Subject Advantage in L1-English Learners’ Production of Chinese Relative Clauses

• Published in: Journal of psycholinguistic research Vol. 52; no. 2; pp. 405 - 424
• Main Authors: Tanaka, Nozomi, Cherici, Alessia
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.04.2023; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Animacy; Asian People; Asymmetry; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Child Development; Child Language; Chinese as a second language; Chinese languages; Cognitive Psychology; Comprehension; East Asian People; English language; English Learners; Error analysis; Humans; Language; Language acquisition; Language Processing; Language Universals; Learning transfer; Musicians; Native Speakers; Nouns; Orthography; Periodicals; Preferences; Psycholinguistics; Psychology; Relative clauses; Second language learning; Second Languages; Chinese as a foreign language; Relative clause; Asymmetry; Elicited production
• ISSN: 0090-6905; 1573-6555; 1573-6555
• DOI: 10.1007/s10936-022-09865-9

This study investigated whether L1-English Chinese learners show a subject preference in their oral production of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) and whether they show animacy effects. We conducted a picture-based elicited production experiment that compared subject and object RCs, varying the object animacy between animate and inanimate. The results from thirty learners showed more targetlike performance in subject RCs than in object RCs, both at group and individual levels, regardless of object animacy. Error analyses revealed that more object RCs were converted into subject RCs than vice versa. These results point toward a clear subject preference despite conflicted findings in previous research on RCs in Chinese as a foreign language. Animacy influenced subject and object RCs alike: both types were easier to produce when featuring an inanimate object. We suggested similarity-based interference or distribution-based effects to account for this finding.