Investigation into clarifying the mechanism of the development of grammatical competence by adult Japanese learners of English

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

A continuing debate in L2 acquisition research is the extent to which adult second language (L2) learners have access to Universal Grammar (UG). Recent research addressing this matter has focussed on formal features of functional categories which are not activated in the L1. This study continues this line of enquiry by investigating whether Japanese speakers can acquire formal features which drive wh-movement in wh-questions (features [+wh, +Q]) and relative clauses (feature [+R]) in English, but are not instantiated in Japanese, using the following two principles of UG : Subjacency Principle (SP) and Generalised Blocking Principle (GBP).To test whether Japanese speakers have acquired the formal features [+wh, +Q] and [+R] in English, and hence are sensitive to SP and GBP effects, a grammaticality judgement task with a five-point scale was administered to five different proficiency levels of adult Japanese speakers, as well as to English native controls. This test had a set of grammatical and ungrammatical relative clauses violating Subjacency. To check the potential effect of the participants' first language (L1), a different group of Japanese speakers were given another grammaticality judgement task with Japanese equivalents of sentences violating Subjacency in English.As a result, there was a proficiency-related increase in possible correct judgement, and adult Japanese learners of English showed the same understanding of relative clauses as native speakers when they reached the high-intermediate level and also of wh-questions when they arrived at the advanced level. This means that advanced Japanese learners of English can acquire feature-driven wh-movement in wh-questions and relative clauses in English, although they were affected by L1 in judging some sentences violating Subjacency constraints as ungrammatical.