An Empirical Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’acquisition Of Embedded Object Wh-questions

That-trace effect has always been a key topic to syntacticians since the1970s. However, the research in the second language acquisition field generally shows a lack of interest in investigating the acquisition of the syntactic property. Recently the feature-assembly approach, derived from the Minimalist Program, has become one of the mainstream approaches to investigate second language acquisition. This study is an attempt to investigate into Chinese learners’ acquisition of embedded object wh-questions. On the basis of Derivation by Phase (Chomsky2001), the study tries to discuss the results in respect of subject-object asymmetry (English subject has a φ feature and an uninterpretable Tense feature to be checked which object doesn’t have), complementizer (C in the main clause has Q/wh/<φ feature; C in the embedded clause has wh-P/φ/fEP/Tense feature) and wh-movement (successive cyclic movement).The present research is a quantitative study, with136test papers issued among middle school students, undergraduates and graduates.90sheets were selected and divided into3different groups according to the English Placement Test scores for data analysis. The results show that generally the acquisition of the target structure improves when their English proficiency increases. The subject-object asymmetry is identified mostly in beginners’ performance; the complexity of feature assembly on C in both main clause and embedded clause inhibits the acquisition of the target structure, and the lack of overt C in L1results in learners’continuous tendency not to use that in L2, even among advanced learners; the wh-movement in the target structure demands successive cyclic movement to converge, which highly increases learners’derivational burden. Moreover, with all the feature properties mentioned above, it is even harder for learners to succeed in the acquistion of the target form, which results in non-significant difference between intermediate and advanced learners. In general, the study indicates that the feature assembly complexity in L2is in correlation with the difficulty of acquisition。The results of this study have given credit to the explanatory power of feature-assembly approach, and are consistent with the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere,2008).