Journal article
Subject Advantage in L1-English Learners' Production of Chinese Relative Clauses
Journal of psycholinguistic research, Vol.52(2), pp.405-424
04/01/2023
DOI: 10.1007/s10936-022-09865-9
PMCID: PMC10163100
PMID: 35462565
Abstract
This study investigated whether L1-English Chinese learners show a subject preference in their oral production of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) and whether they show animacy effects. We conducted a picture-based elicited production experiment that compared subject and object RCs, varying the object animacy between animate and inanimate. The results from thirty learners showed more targetlike performance in subject RCs than in object RCs, both at group and individual levels, regardless of object animacy. Error analyses revealed that more object RCs were converted into subject RCs than vice versa. These results point toward a clear subject preference despite conflicted findings in previous research on RCs in Chinese as a foreign language. Animacy influenced subject and object RCs alike: both types were easier to produce when featuring an inanimate object. We suggested similarity-based interference or distribution-based effects to account for this finding.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Subject Advantage in L1-English Learners' Production of Chinese Relative Clauses
- Creators
- Nozomi Tanaka - Indiana University BloomingtonAlessia Cherici - Indiana University Bloomington
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of psycholinguistic research, Vol.52(2), pp.405-424
- DOI
- 10.1007/s10936-022-09865-9
- PMID
- 35462565
- PMCID
- PMC10163100
- NLM abbreviation
- J Psycholinguist Res
- ISSN
- 0090-6905
- eISSN
- 1573-6555
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 04/01/2023
- Academic Unit
- Linguistics; Center for Social Science Innovation
- Record Identifier
- 9984701833102771
Metrics
38 Record Views