A Study On The Acquisition Of Wh-Questions By Chinese Learners Of English

In the field of second language acquisition, many researchers have tried to testify the accessibility of UG for L2 learners by studying the subjacency principle which put constraints on wh-movemnt. Meanwhile, they found there is subject/object asymmetry in L2 learners’ acquisition of long-distance wh-questions. However, previous studies related to subject/object asymmetry did not show consistent results, rather they reported two opposite asymmetry patterns---subject preference and object preference. Correspondingly, there are two parsing-based accounts for each asymmetry pattern. Specifically, they are Generalized Theta Attachment(GTA) and Distance-Based Theory(DBT) of linguistic complexity, based on gap reanalysis and dependency distance respectively. This study takes bi-clausal who-questions as object, aiming to investigate whether the subject/object asymmetry would appear in the acquisition of English long-distance wh-questions by Chinese learners of English at different proficiency levels, and thus to testify which account can offer a better explanation for the acquisition of long distance wh-question.The participants are 90 Chinese learners of English with different years of English instruction received. They are divided into three groups according to their English proficiency: elementary group, intermediate group, and advanced group. There are 30 students in each group. Two instruments, a Grammaticality Judgment Task(GJT) and an Elicited Comprehension Task(ECT), are conducted. The experiment data are analyzed with SPSS software.The results show that Chinese learners of English display subject/object asymmetry during the acquisition of wh-questions. As the testing sentences are all grammatical and different from one another only in the extraction positions or the finiteness of embedded clauses, it is safely to say that the asymmetry is caused by the processing effects. Also, Chinese learners of English show the same strong preference towards subject extractions in the two tasks regardless of the finiteness of the embedded clauses. Therefore, this finding offers evidence for the predictions of processing difficulty within the framework of DBT. In addition, the results prove that different data-collection methods do not affect the learners’ preference pattern. The two experiments in this study are replication of those in prior studies in which conflicting results are obtained in these two experiments. The present study offers evidence for the subject/object asymmetry of the acquisition of long-distance wh-questions by Chinese learners of English, and discuss the reason for this phenomenon, which will help teachers to adjust their teaching approaches and guide the teaching more effectively.