earticle

영어

The purpose of the study is to examine how Korean EFL learners' knowledge of syntactic islands is represented in their interlanguage grammars of English, focusing on the correlation between proficiency and acceptability of syntactic islands. For this purpose, it explores whether Korean EFL learners display native-like island effects in all types of syntactic islands as their proficiency. It is based on the syntactic acceptability-rating experiment designed by Sprouse et al.(2012), considering factorial design, including two factors, Structure and Gap. The subjects in experimental group were divided into three groups-basic, intermediate, and advanced group-based on the scores of the cloze test and the results in the experiment were compared with English native speakers'. Advanced EFL learners' island effects are shown statistically significantly in subject and adjunct islands at the same level as native speakers' acceptability. Also some of advanced EFL learners are as sensitive to island vs. non-island distinctions as L1 native speakers are. In conclusion, Korean EFL learners can acquire the knowledge of syntactic island structures based on Universal Grammar.