An Empirical Study On The Asymmetrical Acquisition Of English Articles By Chinese Learners

In the framework of Minimalist Program, the present study investigates whether there is an asymmetry for Chinese learners in the acquisition of the definite article and the indefinite article. To be specific, the study mainly focuses on the three questions:(1) in the acquisition of the definite article by Chinese learners, is there an asymmetry between production and comprehension?(2) Is there an asymmetry between the production and the comprehension in the acquisition of the indefinite article for Chinese learners?(3) Is there also an asymmetry in the acquisition of the definite article and the indefinite article?According to the three research questions, and the present study takes the research experiments from Angeliek et al.(2010) for reference. 168 Chinese learners participate in the experiments, which are divided into three different levels based on their different English proficiency: the low level, the intermediate level and the advanced level. And each level is then divided into two groups to separately take part in the production test and comprehension test. The tasks of sentence-comprehension and the picture description are applied in the production test, while the task of truth-value-judgment is used in the comprehension test. All the experimental statistics of the results are processed by SPSS 17.0.As a result, the present study has the three following findings:(1) there is an asymmetry in the definite article’s production and comprehension, as the production is earlier than the comprehension;(2) there is also an asymmetry in the indefinite article’s production and comprehension, as the comprehension is earlier than the production;(3) In the acquisition of the definite article and the indefinite article, there is still an asymmetry. As the definite article’s production is earlier than the indefinite article’s, while the indefinite article’s comprehension is earlier than the definite article’s. The present paper tries to explain the results within the framework of Bidirectional Optimality Theory. The different constraints rankings are the main causes of the results in the asymmetrical acquisition between the definite article and the indefinite article in the bidirectional process. Furthermore, language transfer is also an important factor for the asymmetrical acquisition process.The present paper provides a supplement to the asymmetry in domestic research, also is an empirical proof for the Bidirectional Optimality Theory. In addition, the results further confirm the availability of Universal Grammar in second language acquisition. Moreover, it also provides some references for the article teaching. As for whether the asymmetries found in the present research are influenced by other factors, and whether the bi-OT is available in explaining other asymmetrical phenomena in SLA, which all need to be further studied.