Study On Chinese English Learners’ Acquisition Of Referring Subject In Discourse

The present paper investigates whether there is an asymmetry in the acquisition of referring subjects in Chinese English learners. According to the standard grammar system, it is believed that language users can understand whatever they produce and can also produce whatever they understand. However, this kind of symmetry between the production and comprehension of language may not be an intrinsic attribute of grammar. In recent years, some studies have found that children may produce correct forms while they cannot understand the meaning of them, such as the asymmetry found between pronouns and reflexives in the acquisition of the first language(L1). The acquisition of pronouns’ comprehension is later than that of reflexives. The asymmetry between pronouns and reflexives in L1 acquisition has been widely investigated. Compared to the studies abroad focus on the object pronouns, especially on the studies of pronouns and reflexives, studies at home focus on the null subject and null object. As for the studies on the asymmetry in production and comprehension are quite few, in this paper, we will investigate the referential subjects’ production and comprehension, especially focus on the pronouns and full NPs in the subject position.Namely, we will focus on these questions as follows: a. Will Chinese English learner produce unrecoverable subject pronouns after a topic shift? b. Will Chinese English learner fail to interpret full NPs as a signal for topic shift? c. Is there an asymmetry between the comprehension and production of subject pronouns? This paper makes an empirical study on whether there is an asymmetry in Chinese students’ subject pronouns’ acquisition. Based on the research method from the investigation of Wubs et al.(2009) on the comprehension and production of referring subjects in native language speaking children, our study takes 105 Chinese students of three different English levels as participants, to test both production and comprehension of referring subjects in Chinese English learners. The test contains writing stories according to the pictures and reading comprehension separately. And the data of the results is analyzed by SPSS 17.0.As a result, we find that Chinese students may produce unrecoverable subject pronouns in production, and in comprehension, they may not be able to realize the full noun phrases as a signal of topic shift. There is an asymmetry in the second language acquisition of subject pronouns. Both production and comprehension are delayed. This paper claims that the asymmetries found in the acquisition of referring subjects are because of the lack of bidirectional optimization.This paper provides an empirical proof for the research of the second language acquisition in China, as well as verification for the Asymmetry Grammar Hypothesis, which predicts that correct production and correct comprehension do not always go hand in hand in language acquisition. Delays occur in production in some areas of grammar and occur in comprehension in other areas of grammar. We hope that our study could do some contribution to the study of Chinese students’ L2 acquisition, as for whether the Asymmetry Grammar Hypothesis can explain other phenomenon in SLA, and whether the asymmetries found in this paper are influenced by other factors, the questions should be further investigated in future studies.