2004 Fiscal Year Final Research Report Summary
Errors on subject verb agreement made by Japanese learners' English : Effect of syntactic context
| Project/Area Number |
15520364
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
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| Allocation Type | Single-year Grants |
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| Section | 一般 |
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| Research Field |
Foreign language education
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| Research Institution | Gunma Prefectural Women's University |
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Principal Investigator |
WAKABAYASHI Shigenori Gunma Prefectural Women's University, Faculty of Literature, Professor, 文学部, 教授 (80291962)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2003 – 2004
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| Keywords | grammatical morpheme / 3rd person singular -s / subject-verb agreement / syntactic structure / performance factor / event-related brain potentials / past tense inflection / linear distance |
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| Research Abstract |
Studies in second language acquisition in 1980s and 1990s revealed that learners know more than what is available in input and what can be learned with general learning strategies. On the other hand, the question why some specific items are extremely difficult to acquire did not attract researchers until late 90s. Researchers have tried to answer this question since, but their arguments generally rely on naturalistic data, which were not completely suitable to the purpose. This study has carried out a series of experiments in which syntactic contexts were controlled. The results show that the proportion of errors varies in accordance with certain syntactic contexts, and that this variation is not totally attributable to the linear distance between the subject and the verb.
The whole study is divided into five. In the first study (Chapter 1 in the technical report), I pointed out the importance of the theoretical framework and suggested that the linguistic theory is the most appropriate. In the second study (Chapter 2), three sets of experimental data were presented. The first two were production data collected with an oral translation task, and the other was comprehension data with a self-paced reading task. In the third study (Chapter 3), another oral translation task was carried out. In the fourth study (Chapter 4), event-related brain potentials (ERP) were collected. In the fifth study (Chapter 5), data were collected to investigate the system of verb inflections, and this time, the material was English past tense inflection instead of 3rd person singular -s.
As discussed in the report, we need to carry out further experiments, where a number of variables, such as phonology, syntax, and discourse, are controlled. Some relevant items, such as be-verb and auxiliary have/has, were not dealt with in this study, and hence further research is certainly required.
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Research Products
(2 results)
