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The acquisition of the English system of pronominalization by adult second language learners

University of British Columbia

The study presented in this paper is a second language study of the acquisition of the English system of pronominalization by adult learners of English. It is a partial replication of Ingram and Shaw's (1981) first language acquisition study on the same topic. One hundred and eighty four subjects and twenty control subjects were administered a written task that involved making anaphoric assignments to pronouns in thirty five test sentences, representing seven different sentence construction types. Analysis of the data indicated that the two syntactic constraints of precedence and dominance played major roles in the anaphoric assignments made by all subjects. In addition, these two syntactic constraints were instrumental in delineating developmental stages in the acquisition process. A comparison of the response patterns displayed by the present study's subjects and those displayed by Ingram, and Shaw's subjects revealed a number of differences. These differences suggested that the acquisition process was not invariant and highly sequential in nature, but dynamic and highly creative, allowing a great deal of latitude in terms of the processing strategies employed.

Text

2010-06-10

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http://hdl.handle.net/2429/25526

Language and Literacy Education

University of British Columbia

Graduate