Acquisition of three Chinese de structures by English-speaking learners

Abstract

This study examines English speaking learners’ acquisition of three Chinese de structures, including Nominalization, Cleft, and Relative Clause. Our findings reveal different acquisition patterns for the three structures and identify several major factors such as structural similarities and differences between the native and second languages, feature configurations, native language transfer, memory factors such as the storage and integration cost, learner avoidance strategy, and motivation as role players in the learning process. This study presents new data and perspectives on the understanding of the second language acquisition of Chinese de structures, reveals the acquisitional effects of the identified major factors, proves the validity of Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) and Storage and Integration Resources Accounts (SIRA) as potential universal principles that affect the processing and acquisition of the second language, and provides theoretical and pedagogical implications for the fields of Chinese as a second language and second language acquisition in general as well.