How Chinese Learners Acquire Motion Expressions in English
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- Keywords: language-specific influence; manner verb; motion event expression; path particle; second language acquisition
- Abstract: This study examines how Chinese adult learners of English acquire characteristic motion event expressions in English with an aim of determining which force mainly drives the rate and the progress of second language acquisition. 36 Chinese learners of English, as compared to a group of English monolingual speakers, were requested to describe voluntary motion events showing varied types of manner and path information (e.g. The man jumped across the tracks). Their utterances were analyzed at two levels: a) verb type (manner verb, path verb, general verb) at the lexical level and b) verb-supporting elements (particles, prepositional phrase, zero) at the grammatical level. The results of statistical analyses such as chi-square and one-way ANOVA reveal that although, in general, Chinese learners of English can acquire the typical patterns of motion expression in English, those of intermediate and low proficiencies use specific manner verbs and path particles at a significantly low frequency as compared to English monolinguals. These results show that second language learners have not fully dispensed with the constraints of their native language, suggesting, in general, that languagespecific factors play an important role in second language acquisition.
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The (Non)-linguistic Effects of Motion Event Typology
- Authors:
- Keywords: L2 acquisition of caused motion expressions; linguistic relativity; motion event typology; similarity judgment task
- Abstract: This study tests the hypothesis of linguistic relativity along two lines of research: a) how L2 learners of Chinese and English, respectively, syntactically package semantic components for caused motion (cause, manner, path) in an experimental situation in which they are asked to describe video clips showing caused motion events to an imagery addressee, and b) how monolingual native speakers of Chinese and English judge the similarity between caused motion scenes while viewing them. Our results regarding a) show that Chinese learners of English acclimate to the target pattern of organizing particularly dense caused motion information very rapidly, and English learners of Chinese also arrived at an inter–language showing considerable resemblance to the target system rather than traces of the L1 influence. Our findings regarding b) reveal that despite striking differences between Chinese and English in L1 motion descriptions, native speakers show an identical tendency to prefer the path–match alternate over the manner– match alternate. Overall, these observations suggest that language–specific constraints can be largely shaken off when encoding caused motion in a non– native language, and linguistic and non-linguistic representations of caused motion may be dissociable from each other.
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