Abstract:In the past four decades, the acquisition of English relative clauses has aroused a host of scholars’ attention at home and abroad because of their uniqueness in syntax and complexity in structure. Consequently, hypotheses including Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis have been proposed for the acquisition ordering of relative clauses indicated by their syntactic properties. In recent years with the intensive studies in the prediction of Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis, more attention has been also paid to the significant effect that the types and embedded positions of relative clauses exert on the employment of relative clauses. However, most methods involved were quantitative with the inability to further investigate the strategy used in the production of relative clauses.

This study aims at testing Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis in a deeper way through investigating English majors’ acquisition of English relative clauses by means of the quantitative methods including picture description, grammaticality judgment and sentence combination plus qualitative methods including interview and think-aloud protocol. With all the data analyzed and discussed, we found that Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis only found partial support in different types of tests. Meanwhile, both the relative clause types and their embedment in subject or object position in the matrix clause also had a significant effect on their employing accuracy. Furthermore, the relative clauses that English majors avoided conformed to the prediction of Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis and the data from think-aloud protocol also further supported its prediction to some extent. We conducted this research in the hope to help the Chinese learners of English to realize the acquisition properties of relative clauses in order to master all kinds of relative clauses accurately and efficiently. 

Key words: English relative clauses; Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis; prediction; avoidance

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

1. Introduction-1

1.1 Rationale-1

1.2 Aims and objectives-2

1.3 Organization of this paper-2

2. Literature Review-3

2.1 Relative clauses-3

2.1.1 Definition of relative clauses-3

2.1.2 Types of relative clauses-3

2.2 Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis-4

2.2.1 Definition of Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis-4

2.2.2 Foreign studies on Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis-5

2.2.3 Domestic studies on Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis-6

2.3 Avoidance-7

2.3.1 Origin of avoidance-7

2.3.2 Related stuidies on avoidance-8

3. Research Methodology and Data Collection-9

3.1 Research question-9

3.2 Subjects-9

3.3 Design-9

3.4 Instruments-9

3.4.1 Picture description-9

3.4.2 Grammaticality judgment-9

3.4.3 Sentence combination-10

3.4.4 Interview-10

3.4.5 Think-aloud protocol-11

3.5 Data collection and scoring-11

3.5.1 Scoring for grammaticality judgment-11

3.5.2 Scoring for sentence combination-11

3.5.3 Scoring for picture description-12

4. Results and Discussion-13

4.1 Result of grammaticality judgment-13

4.2 Result of sentence combination-14

4.3 Discussion for the results of GMJ and STC-15

4.4 Result of picture description and discussion-16

4.5 Result of interview and discussion-17

4.6 Result of think-aloud protocol and discussion-18

5. Conclusion-21

5.1 Major findings-21

5.2 Pedagogical implications-21

5.3 limitations and suggestions-21

References-23

Appendix A-25

Appendix B-26

Appendix C-27

Appendix D-29

Appendix E-32

Acknowledgements-33