Multiple Constraints on Second Language Processing of English Dative Alternation

ABSTRACT

The present study investigates the multiple constraints on the processing of English dative alternation by Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners. The intermediate and advanced learners completed an acceptability judgment task which was composed of 30 dative alternations selected from a spoken corpus. The results showed that the intermediate learners were constrained by only one predictor (pronominality of Recipient), whereas the advanced learners were constrained by eight predictors, including animacy of Recipient, syntactic complexity, pronominality of Theme, pronominality of Recipient, person of Recipient, number of Theme, concreteness of Theme as well as preemption. The results demonstrated that the advanced learners were sensitive to multiple constraints when they processed the dative alternation, but the intermediate learners were not. Our findings imply that L2 learners’ sensitivity toward multiple constraints increased as their L2 proficiency improved.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Pinker (1989) refers to three assumptions (non-reliance on negative, introductive generalizations by learners, and arbitrariness of exceptions to generative rules) for children preventing overgeneralization in language use, which is proposed by Baker (1979) as the Baker’s Paradox.

² The quantitative harmonic alignment roughly refers to the order or tendency of linguistic factors which have different prominence. The more prominent the factor is, the more likely it will be used first (Aissen, 1999; Bresnan & Nikitina, 2009; De Marneffe et al., 2012).

³ TEM-8 (Test for English Major Band 8) is a test to measure the English proficiency of college students majoring in English in China with a full score of 100. It has been considered as a very difficult test with well-established reliability and validity.

⁴ CET-4 (College English Test Band 4) is a test to measure non-English-major college students’ English proficiency in China with a full score of 710 and it has been considered as a test with well-established reliability and validity.

⁵ Multicollinearity means that there is a high degree of correlation between independent variables and several related independent variables are talking the same thing (Baayen, 2008).

⁶ We also examined the correlation between entrenchment and preemption in the full model. We found that preemption and entrenchment were not highly correlated in the full model (correlation coefficient: −0.031), thus we tentatively assumed that the multicollinearity was not a problem in the current study.