Factors affecting English-speaking learners’ acquisition of Chinese relative clauses with demonstrative classifier phrases

Abstract

Abstract The current empirical research aimed to investigate native English-speaking learners’ acquisition of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) by conducting two studies. Study I explored the participants’ performance on gapped and gapless relative clauses (RCs) and their interpretation of demonstrative classifier (DCL)-relative clauses. Study II further investigated the participants’ interpretation of DCL-first and DCL-second RCs and discussed contextual effect. Different tasks were designed in the two studies: a sentence-unscrambling (SU) task and an acceptability judgement (AJ) task in Study I; and an interpretation (IT) task in Study II. A total of 20 L2 learners and 20 native speakers of Mandarin participated in our research. The overall results obtained from Study I revealed that gapped RCs were easier to produce and accept than gapless RCs, and learner performance was influenced by DCL position. Moreover, the L2 learners’ L1 knowledge was found to affect their production, but the task effect was not significant. In Study II, DCL-first RCs were found to be as difficult as DCL-second RCs for the L2 learners to interpret. The non-restrictive and restrictive interpretations of DCL-first RCs were found to be much more comprehensible. Finally, the L2 learners’ interpretation of RCs having DCL phrases in different positions showed a tendency of a contextual effect.