Examining Acquisition Aspects of Adverb Case Marker 'ey' in Chinese Learners by Grammaticality Judgment Test

This article takes a critical look at grammaticality judgment tasks in second language acquisition research. It begins by examining the theoretical assumptions that underlie grammaticality judgment tasks, pointing out that previous studies have reported considerable differences between the results obtained from grammaticality judgment tasks and from other, production-oriented tasks. A description of the design features of grammaticality judgment tasks that have been used to date is then provided. There follows an account of a small-scale study designed to investigate the nature of learner judgments. Twenty-one adult advanced Chinese learners of English were asked to judge sentences designed to test their knowledge of dative alternation. The results indicated that the learners rarely used the “not sure” option in the test. Eight of these subjects were then administered a reduced version of the original test as a think-aloud task 1 week later. The results showed that these learners were inconsistent in 22.5% of their judgments. The think-aloud protocols showed that they resorted to a variety of strategies in making judgments. The article concludes by arguing that grammaticality judgment tasks elicit a particular kind of performance that needs to be understood much more thoroughly before it is used as a basis for investigating second language acquisition.

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The Connectionist Approach of Processing L2 Ambiguous English Sentences

English Linguistics Research ◽

10.5430/elr.v6n2p26 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

pp. 26

Author(s):

Hulin Ren

Keyword(s):

Language Processing ◽

English Learners ◽

Language Experience ◽

Syntactic Structures ◽

Grammaticality Judgment ◽

Chinese Learners ◽

Group 3 ◽

Connectionist Approach ◽

Group 2 ◽

Group 1

The connectionist approach to language processing is popular in second language (L2) study in recent years. The paper is to investigate the connectionist approach of Chinese learners’ individual differences in the comprehension of certain ambiguous English sentences. Comprehension accuracy and grammaticality judgment are carried out with three groups with different background of language experience, namely, well-experienced English natives (group 1), well-experienced non-native English learners (group 2) and semi-experienced non-native English learners (group 3) on four types of ambiguous English sentences such as The polite actor thanked the old man who carried the black umbrella. Results of the study are discussed and a number of conclusions based on the results are summarized with regard to L2 learners’ differences in the performance to comprehend ambiguous syntactic structures.

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