A Study Of Acquisition Of English Nouns Plural Markings By Chinese Young Children In Classroom Settings

There have been growing and wide concerns about the noun's plural markings in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics. In first language acquisition and second language research on plural markings, the focuses have been put on the age of subjects, acquisition development and patterns, language transfer, and so on. In contrast to the systematic and extensive investigation of first language plural morpheme acquisition, equivalent research in second language acquisition are scattered and scare. The question had been explored in different aspects by researchers, but there were no results to be satisfied.Although Audrey Li (1999) concluded that Chinese, the language without inflection, has the noun's plural marking–men, there is still very obvious discrepancy between them. On the ground of this conclusion, seven tests were designed to observe and analyze the development of Chinese young children's acquisition of English plural markings in classroom settings. According to the definition of implicit and explicit knowledge in literature, the Task 1 and Task 2 in test (Elicited speech and sentence-picture match) were reliable to measure the explicit knowledge, and Task 3 (Timed Grammatical Judgment Tasks) was reliable to measure the implicit knowledge. The data, which were collected in the subject's performance in tasks were classified by the error types and feather of nouns, were analyzed by SPSS 11.0.The results showed that composite accuracy score and the nouns whose plural forms ended with [s] had statistically negative correlation. That meant there is negative transfer in acquisition because of the discrepancy of English and Chinese plural markings, however, the explicit instruction played a positive role in acquisition.The data analyses and results of this study drew conclusions as follow: First, the acquisition development has no many similarities with that of first language acquisition. Second, the discrepancy between English and Chinese plural markings and the principle of conversations (the maxim of quantity) had provided explanation to the errors in acquisition, and the Chinese young children's acquisition of English plural markings was affected by the negative transfer. Third, although the negative transfer occurred, the explicit instruction in this study played a positive role in acquisition. The exact explicit instruction of surface and underlying representations of English plural rules gave evidence that there is weak interface position between implicit and explicit learning.