Chinese L2 Learners' Acquisition Of English Psych Causative Verbs

The present study is an attempt at finding the learning problems in the acquisition of English psych causative verbs by Chinese learners. Chinese learners of English tend to make the mistake of "predicates errors" in English psych verbs. Furthermore, we observe most English psych causative verbs have the different semantic and syntactic structures as their Chinese counterparts and we observe the English psych causative verbs do not pose the same level of difficulty to the learners. Our study answers the following three questions: (1) Do the Chinese English learners acquire English psych causative verbs in the way as predicted? (2) Given the influence of Chinese, do Chinese learners use lexical causative pattern more or periphrastic structure more? (3) Are Chinese learners familiar with causative form or inchoative form of worry-class verbs?Based on the current theoretical study of English psych causative verbs, our research classified English psych causative verbs into three categories. We discuss how the CAUS factor influence the acquisition of such verbs. In the light of their Chinese counterparts, three hypotheses were made about the acquisition of English psych causative verbs by Chinese L2 learners.In order to answer the questions a GJ test was conducted to investigate the knowledge about English psych causative verbs of 100 subjects from five universities of three regions in China. The scores were calculated by SPSS statistic software. The results revealed that the acquisition route followed by Chinese learners in learning English psych causative verbs is: shock-class → satisfy-class, causative form of worry-class → inchoative form of worry-class. We come to the conclusion that there is sequence for Chinese learners to acquire English psych causative verbs and Chinese impose great influence on learners to acquire these verbs.