Acquisition of cleft structures in L1 and L2
محورهای موضوعی : Journal of Teaching English Language Studies
1 - Islamic Azad University, Takestan Branch,Iran
کلید واژه: word order, Cleft Sentence, Head Noun, Relative Pronoun, Isomorphim,
چکیده مقاله :
The present study aims at exploring the processing difficulty of cleft structures as a type of relative clause for EFL and Persian as first language learners.The impact of head nouns with various functions as well as that of embedding on the processing of Persian and English cleft structures has been investigated in the present study.The participants were 68 Iranian male and female students.Two sets of picture selection tests along with 27 items both in Persian and English were designed for both the Persian and English groups.The Persian items consisted of 4 different cleft types : subject cleft, object cleft with resumption ,object cleft with gap and object clitic cleft .The Engliish language included either subject cleft or object cleft type.Results showed that word order has a significant effect on Persian cleft processing of Iranian children.The results also revealed that word order has a significant effect on EFL learners’ processing of English clef sentences.
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