The Acquisition of Wh-movement by Avanced Japanese Learners of English

概要

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This study examines the extent to which advanced Japanese learners of English are sensitive to Subjacency violations to see if they can acquire feature-driven movement, considering the nature of the operator (wh-Q or relative) and the island from which it has been extracted (complex NP, adjunct, etc). Given that English and Japanese vary in the feature specification of functional category C determining how their properties are realised in wh-question and relative clause formation, a question in adult SLA research is whether or not advanced Japanese learners can acquire different feature specifications of functional category C in English on the basis of the evidence they receive from the input. Participants in the experiment, as well as native English controls, performed a grammaticality judgement task. To test the potential effect of the participants' L1, another grammaticality judgement task with equivalent sentences in Japanese was given to a different group of native speakers of japanese. The results showed that advanced Japanese learners can acquire feature-driven wh-movement in English questions and relative clauses, although they were affected by L1 in judging some sentences violating Subjacency. This is counterexample to the 'failed functional features hypothesis' proposed by Hawkins (1998; 2000) and Hawkins and Chan (1997).
上越教育大学の論文