An Empirical Study On Chinese Senior One Students’ Acquisition Of English Psychological Verbs In Nanjing No.3 Senior Middle School

English psychological verbs are those that are used to depict states of mind. According to the projection positions, they are classified into two types. One is the subject experiencer verb and the other is the object experiencer verb.Based on the Theta Theory, this thesis is a study of Chinese Senior Middle School students’ acquisition of English psychological verbs and attempts to think of a few plans to help the students better master English verbs. 50 fresh students from Nanjing No.3 Senior Middle School are asked to take part in the test. The method of the study is questionnaire survey. Two tasks, picture identification and grammaticality judgment, are designed to test the subjects’ knowledge of English psychological verbs. Then relevant analyses are made to the results of the tasks with the aid of SPSS instrument.The results of the study show that object experiencer verbs are more difficult than subject experiencer verbs, that object experiencer verbs with animate subjects are more difficult than object experiencer verbs with inanimate subjects, that English psychological verbs are more difficult than English non-psychological verbs and that transitive use of object experiencer verbs are more difficult than make construction of object experiencer verbs.From the results, we also find that it’s quite difficult for Chinese Senior Middle School students to acquire English psychological verbs due to the reverse mapping of argument and syntactic position and that Chinese Senior Middle School students are able to figure out the correct argument structure of object experiencer verbs once they acquire the zero cause.