中国学生英语核心句法习得“瓶颈”:来自WH-疑问句的证据

The“bottleneck”in Chinese students'acquisition of core sentence structure:Evidence from WH-questions

本研究使用语法判断测试任务,探讨何种WH-疑问句的转换规则构成我国学生英语核心句法习得的“瓶颈”。高一、高三和大学生三个不同层次共214名学习者参加了本次实验,混合效应模型拟合的结果显示,是否借助助动词来构成WH-疑问句是中国学生WH-疑问句习得的“瓶颈问题”,其中,宾语疑问句的助动词缺失和主语疑问句的助动词冗余是WH-疑问句习得最“顽固的障碍”,即这个句法转换规则不仅比别的规则更难学,而且持续性地难学,很难随着学习者的语言水平以及学习经历的增加而提高。从基于使用的二语习得观看,突显度低可能是造成这一转换规则难学的主要原因,而从原则与参数理论来看,也可能是因为二语习得的参数重置是一件极复杂的事情,有些参数重置难以完成。最后,本文还讨论了研究发现的教学启示。

This study employs a grammaticality judgment test to investigate the"bottleneck"problem in the core syntactic acquisition of WH-questions by Chinese students.A total of 214 learners from three different proficiency levels(high school freshmen,high school seniors,and university students)participate in the experiment.Results fitted with mixedeffects models reveal that the decision to use auxiliary verbs in forming WH-questions constitutes the"bottleneck problem"for Chinese students'WH-question acquisition.Specifically,the absence of auxiliary verbs in object WH-questions and the redundancy of auxiliary verbs in subject WH-questions pose the most"stubborn obstacles"in WH-question acquisition.This means that not only are these syntactic transformation rules more challenging than others,but they also persistently remain difficult,showing litle improvement with increasing language proficiency and learning experience.Viewing this from the perspective of usage-based second language acquisition,the low saliency of this particular transformation rule appears to be a primary factor contributing to its difficulty.Additionally,within the framework of the principle and parameter theory,the complexity of parameter resetting in second language acquisition may explain the difficulty,with some parameter resets being particularly challenging to achieve.The paper concludes with a discussion of pedagogical insights derived from the findings of this study.