An Investigation Of The Acquisition Of Third Person Singular-s By Chinese Middle School Students

Former studies show that second language learners have the most difficulty in acquiring the third-person singular (3SG)-s morpheme. This study is designed to unearth whether or not this difficulty also applied to Chinese learners of English as a second language. This study also focuses on the contribution of a wide range of predictors in order to investigate how they influence the usage of3SG-s. There are two experiments in this study. The oral test in experiment one was administered to60students who study at one middle school in Fuzhou, comprising of30junior middle school students and30senior high school students. The result reveals that there is a high omission rate of3SG-s for both juniors and seniors. It was also found in experiment one that the last phoneme of a verb and the allomorph of3SG-s have a significant impact on both juniors’and seniors’ use of3SG-s in obligatory context. Experiment one also found that the number of syllables in a verb and word frequency have significant effect on the usage of juniors. However, no significant effect was found for predictors like gender, academic record and stress location. Given that seniors have a better command of the English language than juniors, we presented more difficult exam items to seniors than to juniors. However, it was found that the omission rate of3SG-s of seniors is about twice as high as that of juniors, which is against our common knowledge. After examining a wide range of factors, we hypothesized that the difference between the exam items may be the underlying reason. A second experiment was conducted to examine the hypothesis, and the result showed that it was exactly the case. These results show that students in Chinese Middle school fail to use3SG-s correctly in obligatory context.And it also shows that the acquisition of3SG-s could be influenced by other factors, such as the last phoemene of the verb and the allomorph of3SG-s.