The Influence Of Accessibility, Embeddedness And Animacy On Learners’ Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses

Relative clause (RC), as a universal linguistic phenomenon, has received manyresearchers’ attention due to its high frequency in daily communication and its uniquesyntactic properties. This research selects language proficiency as a covariant andinvestigates the effects and effect size of accessibility, embeddedness and animacy onlearners’ acquisition of relative clauses from the perspectives of comprehension andproduction. In this research, accessibility refers to the types of relative clause,including subject relative clause and object relative clause. Embeddedness meansmatrix position where relative clauses are embedded, including matrix subjectposition and matrix object position. Animacy implies antecedent animacy, includinganimate antecedent and inanimate antecedent. By now, some influential theoreticalhypotheses based on these factors are widely accepted, such as Noun PhraseAccessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis, Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis and SOHierarchy Hypothesis. Meanwhile, the effects of these factors on the acquisition ofRCs are also investigated in many empirical studies. However, most previous studiesexplored the effects of one or two factors and the effect of language proficiency waslargely ignored. In addition, little research was conducted on how languageproficiency and intralingual factors affected RC acquisition. Therefore, the presentstudy selected language proficiency as a covariant factor and investigated the effectsof matrix position, relative clause type and antecedent animacy on the comprehensionand production of relative clauses by learners. It addresses the following researchquestions:1. Are there any main effects of accessibility, embeddedness and animacy onlearners’ability to comprehension and production of relative clauses?2. Are there any interaction effects among accessibility, embeddedness andanimacy on learners’comprehension and production ability of relative clauses?3. Under the effects of accessibility, embeddedness and animacy, does theacquisition difficulty order of relative clauses obtained from comprehension and production by learners conform to that predicted by NPAH, PDH and SOHH?This research employed the task of grammaticality judgment and sentencecombination to test118non-English majors’ comprehension and production ability.The subjects’ comprehension and production of relative clauses was measured bytheir scores of the relative clause test, which was made up of72items ofgrammaticality judgment and48items of sentence combination. Finally, the data wereprocessed by means of one-way analysis of covariance (One-Way ANCOVA). Themajor findings are displayed as follows:1. The main effects of accessibility, embeddedness and animacy on theacquisition of RCs varied in different tasks. In both comprehension and productiontasks, accessibility and embeddedness have significant main effects. In thecomprehension of RCs, the explanatory power of embeddedness is larger than that ofaccessibility, while in the production of RCs, the explanatory power of accessibility islarger than that of embeddedness. However, animacy doesn’t have significant maineffect on the comprehension and production of RCs.2. Language proficiency has a significant effect on the acquisition of RCs. Thereis a significant interaction effect for embeddedness and accessibility, embeddednessand animacy, and accessibility and animacy on RCs comprehension. In thecomprehension of RCs, the explanatory power of interaction effect betweenaccessibility and animacy is larger than that of interaction effect between accessibilityand embeddedness, and the explanatory power of interaction effect betweenembeddedness and animacy is smallest. However, only accessibility and animacyexert a significant interaction effect on the production of RCs. In addition, there is nosignificant interaction effect for accessibility, embeddedness and antecedent animacyon learners’acquisition ability of relative clauses.3. The results in the production task lend a total support to Noun PhraseAccessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis, Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis and SubjectObject Hierarchy Hypothesis. Nevertheless, the results in the comprehension taskonly support Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis, partly support Subject ObjectHierarchy Hypothesis and violate Noun PhraseAccessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis. This research takes the influence of subjects’ language proficiency as a covariantfactor and studies the effects of two syntactic factors and a semantic factor oncomprehension and production of RCs by learners. The learners’ acquisition ability ofRCs is affected by multi factors. The current research has both theoretical andpedagogical implications. It is widely accepted that the interaction between learners’linguistic and extra-linguistic knowledge and their cognitive capacities and strategiesdetermine the process of language comprehension and production. On one hand,teachers should not only help learners to improve their RC comprehension ability, butalso should enhance their production ability. On the other hand, teaching materialshould be designed according to Chinese learners’ acquisition order and teachersshould teach relative clauses in a reasonable way.