An Empirical Study On Senior High School Students’ Acquisition Of English Psych Causative Verbs

Psych causative verbs refer to the verbs that cause a certain psych feeling in people.It is difficult for Chinese students to acquire English psych causative verbs because of the inversion of experiencer and stimulus in the sentences and the semantic and syntactic differences between English and Chinese psych causative verbs.This phenomenon has aroused intense interest of scholars at home and abroad in the acquisition of English psych causative verbs.However,most studies focus on the acquisition of English psych causative verbs by college students,and there are few studies specifically on the acquisition of these verbs by high school students.Based on Full Transfer Full Access hypothesis,this thesis mainly discusses high school students’ acquisition of the three types of English psych causative verbs(Shock class,Satisfy class,Worry and Sadden class)according to Zhang Jingyu’s(2001)classification.In addition,it also involves the acquisition of English psych causative verbs by high school students with different English levels.This thesis will specifically address the following two issues:1.What are the characteristics of the acquisition of English psych causative verbs by high school students?2.What is the correlation between the English level of high school students and their acquisition of English psych causative verbs?The participants of the study are 90 sophomores of a high school and they are divided into medium-high level,medium-low level,and low level groups.The experimental tool is questionnaire including a comprehension task and an output task.The former is a grammatical acceptability judgment task and the latter is a sentence combination task.Data results will be analyzed by one-way ANOVA with the statistical software SPSS.The results show that high school students prefer to use syntactic causative structure of English psych verbs rather than lexical causative structure.Moreover,for Chinese high school students,English psych causative verbs of Shock class is the easiest one to acquire,Worry and Sadden class is the most difficult one,and Satisfy class is in the middle.In addition,English level affects students’ acquisition of English psych causative verbs.The English level of high school students is positively correlated with the acquisition of English psych causative verbs.The results confirm Full Transfer Full Access hypothesis.