An Experimental Study Of Chinese Learners' Acquisition Of English Verbal Inflections

This thesis investigates the second language acquisition of English verbal inflections by Chinese-speaking learners of English. The whole work consists of three major parts: first a comparison of the differences between English verbal inflections and Chinese aspectual particles in general, then a study of learners'acquisition of default 3rdsg present tense marker -s as well as default past tense marker -ed in particular, and finally, two hypotheses put forward and checked by an experiment on the learners'accuracy rate of acquiring these two items.In this thesis, two accounts of the relative ease of acquiring default 3rdsg present tense marker–s and default past tense marker–ed by Chinese-speaking learners of English are examined. Results, based on the experimental tasks done by 30 subjects with different English proficiency levels, were obtained.Phonetically speaking, -s is easier to acquire than -ed, for -s is more salient and easier to perceive (less marked). However, given that past tense marker -ed has a close counterpart le/guo in Chinese whereas there is nothing in Chinese that corresponds to default 3rdsg present tense marker -s in English, it is expected that -ed is easier to acquire than–s, syntactically speaking. This gives rise to a question: which ending, -s or -ed, is easier to acquire for Chinese learners of English?The overall test results indicate that there is no difference for low-level learners in acquiring both -ed and -s. Nevertheless, for learners of intermediate and advanced levels, it is easier for them to acquire -ed than -s. It is also suggested that the higher a learner's proficiency level is, the easier it is for him to acquire past tense marker-ed.