Impact of the intrinsic complexity and prior linguistic knowledge on the acquisition of relative clauses

Abstract

The study explores the extent to which the intrinsic complexity of relative clauses (RCs) and prior linguistic knowledge impact the acquisition of RCs by L2 learners. The study investigates the main sources of the erroneous and avoided types of English RCs produced by Persian-speaking learners of English at three proficiency levels. The data elicitation task was a translation test comprised of six types of RCs modeled on the RC types in the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. To analyze the data, the occurrence frequencies of the correctly and erroneously formed RCs were counted and the avoided RCs were identified in each RC type. Then, a precise error analysis was done. The statistical analysis of 3840 RCs showed that the most common error types were (i) forming English RCs with resumptive pronouns and (ii) altering more-marked RCs with non-canonical word order to less-marked RCs with canonical word order. The errors are interpreted as evidence for the impact of both L1 transfer and the universal intrinsic constraints of RCs. The analysis of the avoided RC types, mostly the more marked RCs, indicates that avoidance is mainly linked to the universal intrinsic constraints of RCs.

References

1. Andrews, A. (2007). Relative clauses. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description (pp. 206–236). Cambridge University Press.
2. Bahar, G. (2023). Acquisition of English relative clauses by native speakers of Kurdish Sorani. Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique, 68(3), 414–434. https://doi.org/10.1017/cnj.2023.21
3. Bahar, G. (2024). Examining the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy and the perceptual difficulty hypothesis in English relative clauses formed by native speakers of Central Kurdish. In A. Grond, & S. Gündoğdu (Eds.), Current issues in Kurdish linguistics II (pp. 84–94). Praesens. [In press].
4. Bever, T. (1970). The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and development of language (pp. 279–362). Wiley.
5. Birney, D., Halford, G., & Andrews, G. (2006). Measuring the influence of complexity on relational reasoning: The development of the Latin square task. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 66(1), 146–171. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013164405278570
6. Brandt, S., Diessel, H., & Tomasello, M. (2008). The acquisition of German relative clauses: A case study. Journal of Child Language, 35(2), 325–348. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000907008379
7. Brown, D. (1971). Children’s comprehension of relativized English sentences. Child Development, 42(6), 1923–1936. https://doi.org/10.2307/1127595
8. Chan, A., Matthews, S., & Yip, V. (2011). The acquisition of relative clauses in Cantonese and Mandarin. In E. Kidd (Ed.), The acquisition of relative clauses: Processing, typology, and function (pp. 197–226). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.8.10cha
9. Clancy, P., Lee, H., & Zoh, M.-H. (1986). Processing strategies in the acquisition of relative clauses: Universal principles and language-specific realizations. Cognition, 24(3), 225–262. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(86)80003-8
10. Cramer, D. (1998). Fundamental statistics for social research. Routledge.
11. Cramer, D., & Howitt, D. (2004). The SAGE dictionary of statistics. SAGE.
12. Diessel, H., & Tomasello, M. (2005). A new look at the acquisition of relative clauses. Language, 81(4), 882–906. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2005.0169
13. Doane, D., & Seward, L. (2011). Measuring skewness: A forgotten statistic?. Journal of Statistics Education, 19(2), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10691898.2011.11889611
14. Doughty, C. (1991). Second language instruction does make a difference: Evidence from an empirical study of SL relativization. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13(4), 431–469. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263100010287
15. Doughty, C., & Long, M. (Eds.) (2003). The handbook of second language acquisition. Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470756492
16. Eckman, F. (1977). Markedness and the contrastive analysis hypothesis. Language Learning, 27(2), 315–330. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1977.tb00124.x
17. Eckman, F., Bell, L., & Nelson, D. (1988). On the generalization of relative clause instruction in the acquisition of English as a second language. Applied Linguistics, 9(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/9.1.1
18. Ellis, R. (1994). The study of second language acquisition. Oxford University Press.
19. Gass, S. (1979). Language transfer and universal grammatical relations. Language Learning, 29(2), 327–344. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1979.tb01073.x
20. Gass, S. (1982). From theory to practice. In M. Hynes & W. Rutherford (Eds.), On TESOL 81: Selected papers from the fifteenth annual conference of teachers of English to speakers of the languages (pp. 1–15). Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages.
21. Gass, S. (1980). An investigation of syntactic transfer in adult second language learners. In R. Scarcella, & S. Krashen (Eds.), Research in second language acquisition: Selected papers from the Los Angeles Second Language Acquisition Research Forum (pp. 132–141). Newbury House.
22. Gass, S., & Lee, J. (2007). Second language acquisition of relative clauses. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 29(2), 329–335. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44487155.
23. Hamilton, R. (1994). Is implicational generalization unidirected and maximal? Evidence from relativization instruction in a second language. Language Learning, 44(1), 123–157. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1994.tb01451.x
24. Hawkins, R. (2007). The noun phrase accessibility hierarchy: Lame duck or dead duck in theories of SLA? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 29(2), 345–349. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44487157.
25. Hyltenstam, K. (1984). The use of typological markedness conditions as predictors in second language acquisition: The case of pronominal copies in relative clauses. In R. Andersen (Ed.), Second languages: A crosslinguistic perspective (pp. 39–58). Newbury House.
26. Ioup, G., & Kruse, A. (1977). Interference vs. structural complexity in second language acquisition: Language universals as a basis for natural sequencing. In H. Brown, C. Yorio, & R. Crymes (Eds.), On TESOL 77: Teaching and learning English as a second language: Trends in research and practice (pp. 159–171). TESOL.
27. Izumi, S. (2003). Processing difficulty in comprehension and production of relative clauses by learners of English as a second language. Language Learning, 53(2), 285–323. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9922.00218
28. Kay, M., Elkin, L., Higgins, J., & Wobbrock, J. (2021). ARTool: Aligned rank transform for nonparametric factorial ANOVAs (R package version 0.11.1). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.594511
29. Keenan, E., & Comrie, B. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8(1), 63–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4177973
30. Kidd, E., & Bavin, E. L. (2002). English-speaking children’s comprehension of relative clauses: Evidence for general-cognitive and language-specific constraints on development. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31, 599–617. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1021265021141
31. Kim, C.-E., & O’Grady, W. (2016). Asymmetries in children’s production of relative clauses: Data from English and Korean. Journal of Child Language, 43(5), 1038–1071. http://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000915000422
32. Lazard, G. (1957). Grammaire du persan contemporain. Klincksieck.
33. Leung, J., & Williams, J. (2013). Prior linguistic knowledge influences implicit language learning. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 35. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6kh2b1dw
34. Marefat, H., & Rahmany, R. (2009). Acquisition of English relative clauses by Persian EFL learners. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 5(2), 21–48. https://www.jlls.org/index.php/jlls/article/view/80
35. MacWhinney, B., Bates, E., & Kliegl, R. (1984). Cue validity and sentence interpretation in English, German, and Italian. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23(2), 127–150. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-5371(84)90093-8
36. MacDonald, M., & Christiansen, M. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109(1), 35–54. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.109.1.35
37. Ozeki, H., & Shirai, Y. (2007). Does the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy predict the difficulty order in the acquisition of Japanese relative clauses? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 29(2), 169–196. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263107070106
38. Pavesi, M. (1986). Markedness, discoursal modes, and relative clause formation in a formal and an informal context. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 8(1), 38–55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44486850
39. Prideaux, G., & Baker, W. (1986). Strategies and structures: The processing of relative clauses. John Benjamins.
40. R Core Team. (2021). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing. https://www.R-project.org/
41. Razali, N. M., & Yap, W. B. (2011). Power comparisons of Shapiro-Wilk, Kolmogorov-Smirnov, Liliefors, & Anderson-Darling tests. Journal of Statistical Modeling and Analytics, 2(1), 21–33.
42. Romaine, S. (1984). Relative clauses in child language, pidgins, and creoles. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 4(2), 257–281.
43. Rahmany, R., Marefat, H., & Kidd, E. (2011). Persian-speaking children's acquisition of relative clauses. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 8(3), 367–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/17405629.2010.509056
44. Sadighi, F. (1994). The acquisition of English restrictive relative clauses by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean adult native speakers. IRAL-International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching, 32(2), 141–153.
45. Shapiro, S. S., & Wilk, M. B. (1965). An analysis of variance test for normality (complete samples). Biometrika, 52(3/4), 591–611. https://doi.org/10.2307/2333709
46. Slobin, D., & Bever, T. (1982). Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections. Cognition, 12(3), 229–265. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(82)90033-6
47. Taghvaipour, M. A. (2004). An HPSG analysis of Persian relative clauses. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 274–293. https://doi.org/10.21248/hpsg.2004.16
48. Tavakolian, S. (1981). The conjoined clause analysis of relative clauses. In T. S. (Ed.), Language acquisition and linguistic theory (pp. 167–187). MIT Press.
49. Yas, E. (2016). Acquisition of English relative clauses by German L1 and Turkish L1 speakers [Unpublished doctoral dissertation]. Free University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany. http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/refubium-8862.