The acquisition of English unaccusative verbs and can-do statements of the verbs

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24520676
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Foreign language education
• Research Institution: Otemon Gakuin University
• Principal Investigator: SATO Yasuko 追手門学院大学, 国際教養学部, 教授 (30205976)
• Project Period (FY): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 非対格動詞 / 項構造 / 第二言語習得 / 能力記述文

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study examined the acquisition of unaccusative verbs by Japanese learners of English. To investigate the actual state of the acquisition of English grammar, we gave a grammar test to the learners and analyzed the data by the latent rank theory. The results indicated that the learners were divided into 4 groups and the learners in lower ranks have not had enough knowledge of English grammar. Based on the results, we conducted the experiments of unaccusative verbs and found that the learners had more difficulty in unaccusative verbs when used in externally caused events than internally caused events and there were differences in difficulty among groups of unaccusative verbs and lexical items. By examining learners’ errors from a cognitive point of view, we proposed that there are five stages of the acquisition of unaccusative verbs by Japanese learners of English.

Free Research Field

第二言語習得