Proposal Narrative



I. Background

Among the various well-studied syntactic structures of human language, the grammatical complexity and the universality of the relative clause (RC) make this structure of particular interest to linguists and second language acquisition (SLA) researchers. An example of a relative clause is the noun phrase (NP) the professor that advised me (1a). Many languages have different types of relative clauses including subject RCs, direct object RCs, indirect object RCs, object of preposition and possessive RCs. Some examples are given below.

(1) a. The professor that advised me (is really kind). – subject (SU) RC[1]

b. The professor that I met (is really kind). – direct object (DO) RC

c. The professor that I gave the book to (never returned it) – indirect object (IO) RC

Numerous psycholinguistic and acquisition studies since the 1970s find that in both first and second language (L1, L2), the psychological and learning difficulties of those different types of RCs are consistent with a hierarchy that we refer to as the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH). The NPAH by Keenan & Comrie (1977) is originally a generalization based on observations of natural languages. This hierarchy can be roughly presented as Subject> (Direct) Object>Indirect Object > Object of Preposition >Possessor, where subject RC is assumed to be the highest on the hierarchy and possessor RC as the lowest. This rule states that if a particular language has a structure lower on the hierarchy, then it must also permit those structures that are higher, but not vice versa. That is, if a language has indirect object relative clause, then subject and object relative clauses must also exist in that language. At the same time, studies in processing and acquisition of English and other European languages find that RCs higher on the hierarchy are much easier to process and to learn (Eckman, Bell & Nelson, 1988; Doughty, 1988; 1991; Gass, 1979; 1982; among many others). Different processing models, including the Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 1998; 2000) and the Structural Distance Theory (Hawkins, 1999), are thought to be able to account for the hierarchical behavioral pattern. In addition, such consistency is taken as evidence to supports second language acquisition researchers’ hypothesis of learners’ “access to Universal Grammar”; this hypothesis states that the language possessed or uttered by a second language (L2) learner, though not necessarily native-like, also adheres to constraints observed in natural language (Ritchie & Bhatia, 1996) . In other words, if this hypothesis is correct, then learner language should also adhere to the NPAH.

II. Research Questions

Observations of such learning patterns of RCs are mostly based on studies of RCs of the English type, where the clause ([s that _ advised me] as in (1a)) follows the head noun (the professor). RCs of East Asian languages have prenominal structures: the clause precedes the head noun. Here I compare SU, DO, and IO English RCs with pseudo Chinese RCs.

|English RCs |Pseudo Chinese RCs |

|(1) a. the professor that advised me |(2) a. advised me DE professor[2] |

| b. the professor that I met | b. I met DE professor |

| c. the professor that I gave the book to | c. I gave he book professor |

Researchers’ knowledge of the nature of such prenominal RCs in East Asian languages is meager (Kanno, 2007; Ozeki & Shirai, 2007). Particularly, very few studies have addressed the processing or SLA of RCs in Chinese, a language gaining increasing interest from linguists and language teachers. At the same time, those existing studies yield conflicting results regarding the relative ease of different types of relative clauses (Chiu, 1996; Hsiao & Gibson, 2003; Hsu & Chen, 2007; Kuo & Vasishth, 2006; Lin, 2006; Su, 2004).

To further complicate the issue, Chinese permits the use of demonstratives and classifiers (Dem-CL) in relative clauses.[3] For instance, (2a) (the professor that advised me), a subject RC, can also be expressed by (3a) and (3b), depending on the position of the Dem-CL.

(3) a. that CL advised me DE professor (Dem-CL-subject RC)

b. advised me DE that CL professor (subject RC-Dem-CL)

The only two studies that have attempted to evaluate the interaction of Dem-CL with RC processing or acquisition difficulties again do not offer definite conclusions (Chen, 1999; Wu, Haskell, Kaiser & Anderson, 2007).

Given the current gap in the literature, my dissertation first analyzes the syntactic characteristics of Chinese RCs, with the Dem-CL position into consideration. I will then attempt to answer the following questions:

(1) What types of RCs are easier for L2 learners of Chinese? Assuming that processing ease reflected by speed of reading may predict ease of acquisition, are any psycholinguistic models helpful in analyzing the L2 acquisition of Chinese RCs?

(2) Is the SLA of Chinese RCs by English speakers consistent with the NPAH? What particular difficulties do those learners experience?

III. Experimental Design

To answer those questions, three experiments will be conducted. Experiment 1 is a self-paced reading task, with 96 test items and 30 filler sentences[4], aiming to assess the L2 comprehension difficulty among the four types of RCs, crossing extraction type and Dem-CL position with the following four sequences: (i) Dem-CL-subject RC; (ii) subject RC-Dem-CL; (iii) Dem-CL-object RC; (iv) object RC-Dem-CL. In this experiment, L2 participants will be asked to read sentences from the computer screen and decide whether words in a given sentence are in the correct order. They will proceed sentence by sentence as fast and as accurately as possible. Their reaction time will be recorded. Longer reaction times and higher error rates will be taken to indicate greater processing difficulty. While similar tasks have been shown to be sensitive enough to detect subject versus object RC biases in English (Nicol, Forster, & Veres, 1997), the current study is the first to use such a measure in the L2 processing of Chinese RCs.

Experiment 2, a written sentence completion task, complements Experiment 1 in assessing the effect of Dem-CL position and in evaluating the applicability of different models in L2 processing. While similar tasks have been used in acquisition studies and experimental linguistics (Koda, 1993; Moxey, Sanford, & Dwydiak, 2001), I will first test the validity of the task on an English L1 group (for which subject and object RC bias is supposed to surface). The primary experiment will consist of 16 test items and 24 fillers, with half of the test items (probe sentences) eliciting a Dem-CL-RC sequence, and the other half eliciting a RC-Dem-CL sequence. (4a) (in pseudo Chinese) is a sample probe that elicits a Dem-CL-RC sequence, and an appropriate response is given in (4b). (5a-b) show their English equivalents.

(4) a. That CL______________ DE boy at Beijing University study. (love secretly)

b. That CL I secretly love DE boy at Beijing University study

(5) a. The boy that ______________ studies at Beijing University. (love)

b. The boy that I secretly love studies at Beijing University.

Both L1 and L2 participants will participate in this experiment, with L1 data helping us to evaluate whether L2 production difficulty stems from processing difficulties of the structure or from lack of language competence. The number of productions of each type of RC, or the subjects' preference for each type of RCs, is the dependent measure.

Experiment 3 specifically tests whether the acquisition of Chinese RCs adheres to the NPAH for subject (SU), direct object (DO), indirect object (IO), object of preposition (Oprep), and possessive (Poss) relative clauses. A written sentence combination task will be used. While this is a classical task used to elicit L2 learners’ production of RCs (Gass, 1979; Roberts, 2000; Ozeki & Shirai, 2007), it has never been used in L2 acquisition studies of Chinese RCs. For each test item, participants will be instructed to combine two sentences into one with a relative clause (e.g., For a probe sentence pair: My brother gave a box of chocolate to a girl. That girl was thrilled, a natural way to combine the sentences is The girl that my brother gave a box of chocolate to was thrilled). Number of productions of grammatical RCs of the correct type is the dependent measure. There will be altogether 20 test items, with 4 each eliciting SU, DO, IO, Oprep, Poss relative clauses. L1 speakers will also be invited to participate in this task, as my pilot study indicates that native speakers’ preference for Dem-CL position or omission is of significant relevance to both the theoretical and experimental part of the study.

IV. Expected outcome and significance

My theoretical analysis confirms that RCs in Chinese adhere to universal syntactic constraints on the structure. On that basis, I hypothesize that the L2 acquisition of Chinese RCs would be consistent with the NPAH: L2 learners of Chinese do have access to Universal Grammar. (Conflicting results from previous studies may be due to shortcomings in experiment design.) Dem-CL position is predicted to interact with processing and learning difficulty of RC types.

Apart from investigating the universality of language structures, the project explores how the mechanism underlying L1 processing may be similar or different from L2 processing, and how that can be related to learning order, thus enabling us to better understand the mental representation of languages for L2 speakers. Findings from this project can also provide significant implications for foreign language pedagogy.

V. Timeline

The project has been approved by the dissertation committee, the Internal Review Board at U of A, and the Defense Language Institute where L2 data will be collected. Pilot study results support interaction of the Dem-CL position with RC types. In September, 2008, a recruitment session was held at DLI with 51 participants signing up to volunteer. Draft experiment materials are ready and I am scheduled to collect L2 data from Nov. 3rd to Nov. 14th, 2008 at DLI. L1 data collection and analysis of the L2 data shall begin in December. The project is to be concluded and the dissertation defended by May, 2009.

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[1] In (1a-c), the part before the brackets, for instance, the professor that advised me in (1a), is referred to as the relative clause..

[2] DE in Chinese is a relative marker, and it is similar to ‘that’ in an English relative clause, e.g., (1a), in a very rough sense.

[3] Demonstratives are similar to ‘that’/ ‘this’ in English; classifiers are at some level comparable to English measure words, such as ‘piece’ in ‘a piece of paper’.

[4] Fillers are items that do not have RC structures but are included in the experiment to ensure participant’s innocence regarding the specific sentence structure under examination.

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