Acquisition of cleft structures in L1 and L2
محورهای موضوعی : Journal of Teaching English Language Studies
Maryam Karami
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.
Arosio, F., F., Adani & Guasti, M.T. (2005), Processing grammatical features by Italian children. In D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia and C. Zaller (Eds.), Proceedings of the 30th Boston University Conference on Language Development.
Bates, E., & Devescovi, A. (1989). Crosslinguistic studies of sentence production. In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds.), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing (pp. 225-256). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1982). Functionalist approaches to grammar. In E. Wanner & L. Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art (pp. 173-218). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Hayes, J. R. (Ed.), Cognition and the development of language. New York:Wiley.
Bybee, J. & Hopper, P. (2001). Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure.Amsterdam :Benjamins.
Chomsky, N. (1973). Conditions on transformations. In S. R. Anderson and P. Kiparsky (Eds.), A Festschrift for Morris Halle. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Reprinted in Noam Chomsky (Ed.), (1977), Essays on Form and Interpretation. pp. 81–160. New York: North-Holland.
Collins, C. (1994). Economy of derivation and the generalized proper binding condition. Linguistic Inquiry, 25, 45–61.
Cook, V. (1994). Timed grammaticality judgements of the head parameter in L2 learning. In G. Bartelt (Ed.), The dynamics of language processes, 15-31
Correa, L. M. (1995). An alternative assessment of children’s comprehension of relative clauses. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 183-203.
Declerck, Renaat.1988.Studes on copular sentences ,clefts and pseudo-clefts . Leuven University Press.
Delahunty , Gerald .1982.Topics in the syntax and semantics of English cleft sentences. Indian University Linguistics Club , Bloomigton.
Delin , Judy.1989 .Cleft constructions in discourse . Unpublished doctoral dissertation , University of Edinburge.
Dittmar , M . , Abbot – Smith , K . , Lieven , & Toasello , M . (2008 ) . Young German children's early syntactic competence : A preferential looking study . Developmental science , 11 , 575 – 582 .
Dik , S . ( 1989 ) .The theory of functional grammar . part I : the structure of the clause . Dordrecht : Foris .
Frauenfelder, U. H., Segui, J. & Mehler, J. (1980). Monitoring around the relative clause. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19, 328-337.
Gholam Alizade , Khosrou . 1998 . The structure of Persian Language . Tehran : chya? Ketab .
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 68, 1-76.
Gibson, E., & Schutze, C. (1999). Disambiguation preferences in noun phrase conjunction do not mirror corpus frequency. Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 263–279.
Goodluck, H. & D. Stojanovic(1996). The structure and acquisition of relative clauses in Serbo. Croatian. Language Acquisition, 5, 285-315
Gordon, P. C., Hendrick, R., & Johnson, M. (2001). Memory interference during language processing. Journal of Experimental Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Language, 27, 1411–1423.
Gundel , Jeanett . 1977 . Where Do Cleft Sentences Come From? Language 53 (3), 542 – 559 .
Halliday , M . A . K . Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English , part 2 , Journal of Linguistics , 1967 , 3 , 199 – 244 .
Halliday , Michael A . K . 1970 . " Language structure and Language Function " . In John Lyons , ( Ed .) , New Horizons in Linguistics , ( 40 – 165 ) . Harmond Sworth : Penguin .
Hedberg , Nancy . 1990 . Discourse Pragmatics and Cleft Sentences in English.s
Hedberg , Nancy . 2000 ." The Referential Status of Clefts " . Language. 76(2), 891 – 920 .
Hawkins, R. (1989). Do second language learners acquire restrictive relative clauses on the basis of relational or configurational information? The acquisition of French subject, direct object, and genitive restrictive clauses by language learners. Second Language Research, 5, 156-188.
Huddlston, R. (1984). Introduction to the Grammar of English, Cambridge University Press.
Karimi, S. (2001). Persian complex DPs: How mysterious are they? Canadian Journal of Linguistics 46, 63-96.
Karimi, S. (2005). A minimalist approach to scrambling: Evidence from Persian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Keenan, E. L. (1975). Variation in universal grammar. In R. Fasold and R. Shuy (Eds.), Analysing variation in language. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press.
Keenan, E. L. & Comrie, B. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8, 63–99.
Kidd, E. & Bavin, L. B. (2002). English-speaking children’s comprehension of relative clauses: Evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31(6), 599-617.
King, J. & Just, M. A. (1991). Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 580–602.
Labelle, M. (1990). Predication, wh-movement, and the development of relative clauses, Language Acquisition, 1, 95-119.
Lambrecht, K. (2001). A Framework for the Analysis of Cleft Constructions. Linguistics 39 (3), 463 – 516 .
Leech , G. (2006). A Glossary of English Grammar. Edinburg University Press.
MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. (2002). Reassessing working memory: comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1999). Psychological Review, 109, 35–54.
Mahootuian , Shahrzad . 1997 . Persian . New York : Routledge .
O’Grady, W. (1999). Toward a new nativism. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 21, 621-633.
Pavey , Emma . 2004 .The English It – Cleft Consruction : A Role and reference Grammar Analysis . PhD Dissertation, University of Sussex .
Reali, F., & Christiansen, M. H. (2006). Processing of relative clauses is made easier by frequency of occurrence. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 1-23.
Schriefers, H., & A.D., Friederici, & K., Kühn, (1995).The processing of local ambiguous relative clauses in German. Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 499-520
Workshop, 40th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2002), pp. 60-65. Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge.
Slobin, D. (1973). Cognitive prerequisites for the development of language. In C. Ferguson & D. Slobin (Eds.), Studies of child language development (pp. 175-208). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Slobin, D. I. & Bever, T. G. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition, 12, 229-265.
Tarallo, F. & Myhill, J. (1983). Interference and natural language in second language acquisition. Language Learning, 33, 55-76.
Townsend, D. J., & Bever, T. G. (2001). Sentence comprehension: The integration of habits and rules. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wanner, E., & Maratsos, M. (1978). An ATN approach in comprehension. In M. Halle, J. Bresnan, & G. Miller (Eds.), Linguistic theory and psychological reality (pp. 119–161). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wingfield, A., & Titone, D. (1998). Sentence processing. In J. Gleason & N. Ratner (Eds.), Psycholinguistics (pp. 227-274). Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace College.
