Other: English relatives’ attachment from Second Language Learners

For second language learners, this high attachment preference can be significantly transferred to English relative clauses from Chinese ones for second language learners.

English relatives’ attachment from Second Language Learners

In this study, a survey including both Chinese relative clauses and English relative clauses is carried out to examine how do Chinese-English learners process the second language, i.e. English relative clauses in terms of attachment?
Method
The stimuli in this experiment were 10 Chinese targets and 10 English targets, which were mixed with 10 Chinese fillers and 10 English fillers. 40 sentences (20 targets) were presented to the participants. The participants chose one of the two NP choices after reading the questions. The experiment was carried out via Qualtrics survey software. Participants in this experiment were Mandarin speakers in their twenties with English as their second language (N= 85).
Results
85 subjects participated in the experiment (English section). The NP high attachment responses take up to 69.96%; and the NP low attachment responses takes 30.04% among Chinese speakers who have learned English as their second or foreign language. The logistic regression shows that the higher NPs are significantly favored than the lower NPs (Intercept = 0.84560, Std. Error = 0.07531, z value = 11.23, Pr(>|z|) <2e-16 ***).
85 subjects participated in the questionnaire (Chinese section). The NP high attachment responses take up to 55.09%; and the NP low attachment responses takes 44.91% among Chinese native speakers. The logistic regression shows that the higher NPs are significantly favored than the lower NPs (Intercept = 0.2045, Std. Error = 0.0692, z value = 2.955, Pr(>|z|) <0.01 **).
Conclusion
There exists a high attachment bias among Mandarin speakers. Besides, for second language learners, this high attachment preference can be significantly transferred to English relative clauses from Chinese ones for second language learners.

Info

Day: 2020-11-19
Start time: 17:30
Duration: 00:30
Room: Clotilde Tambroni
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

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