Study On The Asymmetry Between Pronouns And Reflexives In Second Language Acquisition

The present paper investigates whether there is an asymmetry between pronouns andreflexives in Chinese students’ second language acquisition. The present study draws on theexperiences of the investigation from Ruigendijk et al.(2010) on the comprehension andproduction of pronouns and reflexives in children acquiring German and Hebrew.186Chinese students, in three different levels of English proficiency, are tested through the tasksof picture selection and picture description. And the data of the results is analyzed by SPSS17.0. At last, the author discusses the results within Optimality Theory, based on UniversalGrammar and Language Transfer Theory.According to Chomsky’s Binding Theory, pronouns are bound by Principle A andreflexives are bound by Principle B, and Principle A and Principle B are complementary toeach other. And since Binding Theory (BT) is part of the innate module of UniversalGrammar, the binding of pronouns and reflexives should be acquired symmetrically at anearly age. But many researches have found that there is an asymmetry between pronouns andreflexives in L1acquisition, namely the acquisition of pronouns’ comprehension is later thanthat of reflexives. The asymmetry between pronouns and reflexives has been widelyinvestigated in L1acquisition. In L2acquisition researches, however, this kind of studies isquite few. People pay much more attention on reflexives and Principle A than on pronounsand Principle B. An important reason is that reflexives have been argued to be subject toparametric variation and hence provide a suitable case for investigating whether parameterscan be reset in L2acquisition, while Principle B, on the other hand, is not parameterizedwhich means languages do not vary in disallowing pronouns to take local antecedents. ThusPrinciple B has been relatively neglected by L2researchers. Based on the research method of a foreign study, this paper is trying to figure out whether reflexives and pronouns aresymmetrical in L2acquisition. And we are going to explain the results within the frameworkof Optimality Theory. We attribute the results in second language acquisition to the transfer ofconstraints rankings from Chinese to English, and the different constraints relations betweenEnglish pronouns and reflexives.To be specific, we investigate the following questions:(1) Is there an asymmetrybetween the pronouns’ production and comprehension?(2) Is there an asymmetry between thereflexives’ production and comprehension?(3) Is there an asymmetry between the acquisitionof pronouns and reflexives? And if there is one, is it the same with L1acquisition or not?As a result, we find that in the process of Chinese students’ English study,(1) pronouns’comprehension and production are asymmetrical as the production is earlier than thecomprehension;(2) reflexives’ comprehension and production are asymmetrical as theproduction is earlier than the comprehension;(3) asymmetries are also found between theacquisition of pronouns and reflexives as pronouns’ production and comprehension are bothearlier than that of reflexives, which is quite different from the results found in L1acquisition.This paper claims that the asymmetries found here in (1) and (2) are caused by the differencein constraints ranking between Chinese and English, and attributes Chinese students’difference performance to mother language transfer. As for the result in (3), apart from theinfluence from language transfer, the different constraints relations between reflexives andpronouns themselves are also key factors for the asymmetry found between them two.This paper provides an empirical proof for the research of SLA in China, as well as averification for the asymmetry theories. What is more, we hope that our study can make somecontribution to Chinese students’ L2acquisition. As for whether OT is available in explainingother phenomenons in SLA (e.g. the asymmetry between “she” and “he” in Chinese students’English study), and whether the asymmetries found in this paper are influenced by otherfactors, we will know from the future studies.