earticle

영어

This study examined Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners’ production of English RCs to probe whether they show the same asymmetry patterns as native English speakers do. The study reduplicated Kim & O’Grady’s (2016) elicited production task and focused on comparing subject relatives with indirect object relatives and comparing direct object relatives with oblique relatives. Forty college students participants were divided into two groups depending on their proficiency and the results showed that it was much easier for MC-speaking learners to produce subject relatives than indirect object relatives. However, it was difficult for them to produce both direct object and oblique relative clauses, especially for the low intermediate proficiency group. Furthermore, oblique relative clauses were more challenging for both L2 groups. The results almost conformed to Kim & O’Grady’s (2016) findings: native English speakers were more likely to produce subject relatives than indirect object relatives and both direct object and oblique relatives were difficult for children (not adults) to produce.