The Acquisition of Complex Structures: The Case of Child ESL
- 1 Department of English Language, Tokyo Denki University, Tokyo, Japan
Abstract
This study examines how complex linguistic structures are acquired in child English as a second language. The spontaneous speech producing by a Japanese primary school child, learning English in a naturalistic environment, was audio-recorded regularly over two years and the development of complex syntactic structures containing subordinate clauses was compared with the acquisition of other English morphosyntactic structures as represented within Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, 1998; Pienemann, Di Biase, & Kawaguchi, 2005). Although PT predicts that subordination is acquired at the highest stage in processability hierarchy, the results in this longitudinal study show that some of the subordinate constructions emerge at earlier stages in child ESL acquisition.
- Bettoni, C., & Di Biase, B. (in preparation). Grammatical development in second languages: Exploring the boundaries of processability theory.
- Bloom, L. (1991). Language development from two to three. Cam bridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Bowerman, M. (1979). The acquisition of complex sentences. In P. Fle tcher, & M. Garman (Eds.), Language acquisition: Studies in first language development (pp. 285-305). Cambridge: Cambridge Uni versity Press.
- Bresnan, J. (2001). Lexical-functional syntax. Oxford: Blackwell.
- Diessel, H. (2004). The acquisition of complex sentences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511486531
- Diessel, H., & Tomasello, M. (2000). The development of relative clauses in spontaneous child speech. Cognitive Linguistics, 11, 131-151.
- Diessel, H., & Tomasello, M. (2001). The acquisition of finite comple ment clauses in English: a corpus-based analysis. Cognitive Linguis tics, 12, 97-141. doi:10.1515/cogl.12.2.97
- Diessel, H., & Tomasello, M. (2005). A new look at the acquisition of relative clauses. Languages, 81, 882-906.
- Doughty, C. J. (1991). Second language instruction does make a diffe rence: Evidence from an empirical study of SL relativization. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13, 431-469. doi:10.1017/S0272263100010287
- Dyson. B. (2010). Learner language analytic methods and pedagogical implications. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics, 33, 30.1-30.21. doi:10.2104/aral1030
- Eckman, F.R., Bell, L., & Nelson, D. (1988). On the generalization of relative clauses instruction on the acquisition of English as a second language. Applied Linguistics, 9, 1-20. doi:10.1093/applin/9.1.1
- Gass, S. (1979). Language transfer and universal grammatical relations. Language Learning, 29, 327-344. doi:10.1111/j.1467-1770.1979.tb01073.x
- Izumi, S. (2003). Processing difficulty in comprehension and produc tion of relative clauses by learners of English as a second language. Language Learning, 53, 285-323. doi:10.1111/1467-9922.00218
- Keenan, E., & Comrie, B. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and uni versal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8, 63-99.
- Kidd, E., & Bavin, E. L. (2002). English-speaking children’s compre hension of relative clauses: Evidence for general-cognitive and lan guage-specific constraints on development. Journal of Psycholingui stic Research, 31, 599-617. doi:10.1023/A:1021265021141