A Study On The Acquisition Of Relative Clauses By Chinese English Learners

In recent years,the great attention from numerous researchers has been attracted to the study of relative clause acquisition.Researchers at home and abroad have carried out numerous researches from different perspectives to explore the acquisition of RCs,most of which only focused on the accessibility and embeddedness.Besides,psychological linguists argued that the animacy also influences the acquisition of RCs.However,most of the researches only took the antecedent animacy into consideration,neglecting the animacy of the noun within the RCs.We seldom find researches that take into consideration the accessibility,antecedent animacy and the animacy of noun within the RC altogether to explore the acquisition of RCs.Therefore,the present study will be based on the previous studies and choose the students from different majors in Ningbo University randomly to investigate the acquisition of eight types of RCs by means of empirical approach,manipulating three factors-the accessibility,antecedent animacy and the animacy of noun within RC and combining with language proficiency.The acquisition of the eight types of RCs is studied,namely,S-A-A,S-A-I,S-I-I,S-I-A,O-A-A,O-A-I,O-I-I and O-I-A.The elicitation materials employed in the study are on the model after Matthew J.Traxler(2002),including the sentence combination test and the grammaticality judgment.The software Statistic Package for Social Science 16.0(SPSS 16.0)is used to analyze the data.The chief findings of this study run as follows.(1)In both tests,the acquisition of the Subject RCs is easier than the Object RCs with account of the accessibility.However,in the consideration of the antecedent animacy,the acquisition order is similar among three groups: S-A-*>O-A-*,O-I-*>S-I-*.When the accessibility and animacy of the two nouns are taken into consideration,though the acquisition difficulty order of eight types of RCs is different,the similarity is also found as follows: S-A-I >O-A-I,S-A-A>O-A-A,S-I-I>O-I-I,O-I-A>S-I-A.(2)Through a three-way analysis of variance,an analysis within-subjects factor,the results show that the learner with different language proficiency use the different syntactic and semantic cue to process the RCs and the factors exert their effect on the different degree among the three groups.The accessibility has a significant effect on the acquisition of RCs.The significant effect of antecedent animacy is found only in the intermediate language proficiency groups in the two tests.In the sentence combination test,the effect of the animacy of noun within RC arriving at the significance level is found only in the high language proficiency group.However,the effect of the animacy of noun within RC in the grammaticality judgment test doesn't reach the significant level in three groups.Among three groups in the sentence combination test,the significant interaction effect of every two factors exists.However,there is no significant interaction effect of the two noun's animacy in the grammaticality judgment test.As for the interaction effect of three factors,the significant interaction effect of three factors is found among three groups in the sentence combination test while there doesn't exist significant interaction effect in the low language proficiency group in the grammaticality judgment test.(3)Comparing the results of the three groups,the writer finds that the English learners with higher language proficiency do significantly better than those learners of a lower language proficiency in most types of RCs.Through the analysis of one-way of variance,English proficiency exerts influences on the acquisition of RCs.From the statistics analysis and discussion,the study finds that the acquisition of RCs is affected by various factors.Besides,the study interprets these findings on the basis of different theories,such as NPAH and perspective-shifting account.The findings are hoped to enlighten English teaching and learning.