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THE ADULT SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS’ ACQUISITION AND PRODUCTION OF SUBJECT-OBJECT RELATIVE CLAUSES

Year 2021, , 106 - 124, 01.06.2021
https://doi.org/10.32321/cutad.861485

Abstract

Studies on the acquisition, production and comprehension of relative clauses have been increasing dramatically in recent decades. Various models have been proposed to explain the mechanism and dynamics of relative clauses. The relative complex nature of relative clauses has been challenging linguists and cognitive scientists. However, one of the commonalities in these models is that object relative clauses are harder to process, comprehend and produce than subject relative clauses. This study aimed to focus on the adult learners’ acquisition of relative clauses. Therefore, four tasks were developed to elicit the data regarding the production and comprehension of subject-object relative clauses. Hamilton’s subject-object hypothesis was tested. Five international participants learning Turkish and seven Turkish individuals learning English were involved in the study. The results show that all of the participants produced and comprehended subject relative clauses more easily than object relative clauses. The findings of the study support those of the related literature in that object relative clauses are harder to process, produce and comprehend.

References

  • Aksu Koç, A. A. and Slobin, D. I. (1985). Acqusition of Turkish. In (D. I. Slobin, Ed.) The cross-linguistic study of language acqusition, Vol. 1: The data. (839-878) Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrance Erlbaum Associates.
  • Andrews, A. D. (2007). Relative clauses. In (T. Shopen, Ed.) Language typology and syntactic description 2, 206–236 (2nd ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Baysal, A. (2001). A study on restrictive relative clauses with particular reference to data triangulatation in ELT research. Anadolu Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 1(1), 129-146.
  • Bergen, B. and Chang, N. (2005). Embodied construction grammar in simulation-based language understanding. Construction Grammars: Cognitive Grounding and Theoretical Extensions, 3, 147-190.
  • Bod, R. (2006). Exemplar-based syntax: How to get productivity from examples. The Linguistic Review, 23(3), 291-320.
  • Boran, B. (2018). The role of context on processing of Turkish subject and object relative clauses. Unpublished master thesis, Hacettepe University, Ankara.
  • Brown, J. D. and Rodgers, T. S. (2002). Doing second language research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Cagri, I. M. (2009). Arguing against subject incorporation in Turkish relative clauses. Lingua, 119(2), 359-373. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
  • Comrie, B. (1981). The formation of relative clauses. In (B. Lloyd and J. Gay, Ed.) Universals of Human Thought: Some African Evidence, 215–233. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Croft, W. (2001). Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • De Vries, M. (2002). The syntax of relativization. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Utrecht, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics.
  • Diessel, H. (2004). The acquisition of complex sentences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Diessel, H. (2007). Frequency effects in language acquisition, language use, and diachronic change. New Ideas in Psychology, 25(2), 108-127.
  • Diessel, H. and Tomasello, M. (2005). A new look at the acquisition of relative clauses. Language, 81(4), 882-906.
  • Erdoğan, A. G. V. (2005). Use of English relative clauses by Turkish learners: A study of errors. Çukurova Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi, 3(2), 22-28.
  • Gennari, S. P. and MacDonald, M. C. (2008). Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses. Journal of Memory and Language, 58(2), 161-187.
  • Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 69, 1-76.
  • Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. University of Chicago Press.
  • Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford University Press on Demand.
  • Göksel, A. and Kerslake, C. (2004). Turkish: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.
  • Guasti, M., Vernice, M. and Franck, J. (2018). Continuity in the adult and children’s comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in French and Italian. Languages, 3(3), 24.
  • Gutierrez Mangado, M. J. (2011). Children's comprehension of relative clauses in an ergative language: the case of Basque. Language Acquisition, 18(3), 176-201.
  • Hamilton, R. (1994). Is implicational generalization unidirectional and maximal? Evidence from relativization instruction in a second language. Language Learning, 44, 123- 157.
  • Hamilton, R. L. (1995). The noun phrase accessibility hierarchy in SLA: Determining the basis for its developmental effects. In (F. Eckman, D. Highland, P. W. Lee, J. Mileham and R. Weber, Eds.) Second Language Acquisition Theory and Practice, 101–114. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  • Hawkins, J. (1999). Processing complexity and filler-gap dependencies across grammars. Language, 75, 244-285.
  • Kayne, R. S. (1994). The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
  • Keenan, E. and Comrie, B. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and Universal Grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8, 63-100.
  • Kim, J., and Won, E. (2020). Effects of inductive and deductive grammar instruction based on the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy: on Korean efl middle school students. Language & Literature, 46, 169-197.
  • Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997). The basic variety (or: Couldn't natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research, 13(4), 301-347.
  • Koçak, A. (2020). Turkish tertiary level EFL learners’ recognition of relative clauses. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 16(4), 1637- 1655.
  • Kornfilt, J. (1997a). Turkish. London: Routledge.
  • Kornfilt, J. (1997b). On the syntax and morphology of relative clauses in Turkish. Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi, 8, 24-51.
  • Kornfilt, J. (2000a). Some syntactic and morphological properties of relative clauses in Turkish. In (A. Alexiadou, P. Law, A. Meinunger and C. Wilder, Eds.) The Syntax of Relative Clauses, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 121-159.
  • Kornfilt, J. (2000b). Locating relative agreement in Turkish and Turkic. In (C. Kerslake and A. Göksel, Eds.) Studies in Turkish and Turkic languages, 189-196. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
  • Larsen Freeman, D. (1997). Chaos/complexity science and second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 18(2). 141–165.
  • Larsen Freeman, D. and Lynne C. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Lehmann, C. (1986). On the typology of relative clauses. Linguistics, 24(4). 663–680.
  • MacDonald, M. C. and Christiansen, M. (2002). Reassessing working memory: comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1999). Psychological Review, 109, 35-54.
  • Mackey, A. and Gass, S. M. (2015). Second language research: Methodology and design. Routledge.
  • O’Grady, W. (2011). Relative clauses: Processing and acquisition. In (E. Kidd, Ed.) The Acquisition of Relative Clauses: Processing, Typology, and Function, 13–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • O’Grady, W., Lee, M. and Choo, M. (2003). A subject-object asymmetry in the acquisition of relative clauses in Korean as a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 433-448.
  • Ördem, E. (2017). Acquisition of Zero Relative Clauses in English by Adult Turkish Learners of English. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 5(1), 190-195.
  • Ördem, E., Özezen, M. Y., Darancık, Y., Mavaşoğlu, K. and Hadutuğlu, K. (2018). Syntactic variation of zero object (non-subject) relative clauses: A cross-linguistic perspective. International Journal of Language Academy, 6(5), 391-401.
  • Özçelik, Ö. (2006). Processing relative clauses in Turkish as a second language. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, PA, The United States of America.
  • Paluluoğlu, N. Ş. (2017). Syntactic processing differences and the effects of memory-load interference for object relative and subject relative clauses in Turkish. Unpublished master thesis, University of Yeditepe, İstanbul.
  • Reali, F. (2014). Frequency affects object relative clause processing: Some evidence in favor of usage‐based accounts. Language learning, 64(3), 685-714.
  • Reali, F. and Christiansen, M. H. (2007). Word chunk frequencies affect the processing of pronominal object-relative clauses. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60(2), 161-170.
  • Ross, J. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. Reprinted as Infinite Syntax! (1986). Norwood, New Jersey: ABLEX Publishing Corporation.
  • Smith, C. (1964). Determiners and Relative Clauses in a Generative Grammar of English. Language 40(1), 37-52.
  • Tabor, W., Juliano, C., and Tanenhaus, M. K. (1997). Parsing in a dynamical system: an attractor-based account of the interaction of lexical and structural constraints in sentence processing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12(2), 211-272.
  • Tarollo, F. and Myhill, J. (1983). Interference and natural language processing in relative clauses and wh-questions. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 14, 39-70.
  • Turan, C. (2012). Degree of access to universal grammar / transfer from L1 in the learning of relative clauses by Turkish learners of English. Unpublished master thesis, University of Hacettepe, Ankara.
  • Turan, C. (2018). An eye-tracking investigation of attachment preferences to relative clauses in Turkish. Unpublished Doctoral dissertation, University of Hacettepe, Ankara.
  • Underhill, R. (1972). Turkish participles. Linguistic Inquiry, 3, 87-99. Underhill, R. (1976) Turkish grammar. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press.
  • Uzundag, B. A. and Küntay, A. C. (2019). The acquisition and use of relative clauses in Turkish-learning children's conversational interactions: a cross-linguistic approach. Journal of child language, 46(6), 1142-1168.
  • Van Schaaik, G. (2020). The Oxford Turkish grammar. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Wiechmann, D. (2015). Understanding relative clauses: A usage-based view on the processing of complex constructions (Vol. 268). Walter de Gruyter GmbH and Co KG.: Berlin.
  • Wilson, W. (1963). Relative Constructions in Dagbani. Journal of African Languages, 2(2), 139-144.
  • Yas, E. (2016). Acquisition of English relative clauses by German L1 and Turkish l1 speakers. Doctoral dissertation, Südwestdeutsche Verlag für Hochschulschriften, Germany.
  • Young, S. K. (2018). Relation between frequency and processing difficulty of English relative clauses by l2 learners: a learner corpus analysis. 언어연구, 34(3), 491- 504.
  • Yumrutaş, N. (2009). Acquisition of relative clauses in Turkish. Unpublished MA thesis, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul.
  • Yun, J., Chen, Z., Hunter, T., Whitman, J. and Hale, J. (2015). Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 24(2), 113-148.

İKİNCİ DİLİ ÖĞRENEN YETİŞKİNLERİN ÖZNE-NESNE KONUMUNDAKİ SIFAT CÜMLECİKLERİNİ EDİNİMİ

Year 2021, , 106 - 124, 01.06.2021
https://doi.org/10.32321/cutad.861485

Abstract

Sıfat cümleciklerinin edinilmesi, üretilmesi ve anlaşılması üzerine çalışmalar, son yıllarda önemli bir şekilde artmaktadır. Sıfat cümleciklerinin mekanizmasını ve dinamiklerini açıklamak için çeşitli modeller önerilmiştir. Sıfat cümleciklerinin görece karmaşık doğası, dilbilimciler ve bilişsel bilim alanında çalışan insanlar için önemli bir sorun olarak devam etmektedir. Bununla birlikte, bu modellerdeki ortak yönlerden biri, nesne konumundaki sıfat cümleciklerinin işlenmesinin, anlaşılmasının ve üretilmesinin özne konumundaki sıfat cümleciklerine gore daha zor olmasıdır. Bu çalışma, yetişkin öğrencilerin sıfat cümleciklerini edinmelerine odaklanmıştır. Özne-nesne konumundaki sıfat cümleciklerinin üretimi ve anlaşılmasına ilişkin verileri ortaya çıkarmak için dört veri toplama aracı geliştirilmiştir. Bu çalışmada Hamilton’un özne-nesne hipotezi test edilmiştir. Hamilton’a göre nesne konumundaki sıfat cümleciklerinin edinimi özne konumundaki sıfat cümleciklerinden daha zordur ve daha geçtir. Çalışmaya Türkçe öğrenen beş uluslararası ve İngilizce öğrenen yedi Türk öğrenci katılmıştır. Sonuçlar, tüm katılımcıların özne konumundaki sıfat cümleciklerini nesne konumundaki sıfat cümleciklerine göre daha kolay ürettiklerini ve anladıklarını göstermektedir. Çalışmanın bulguları, nesne konumundaki sıfat cümleciklerinin işlenmesinin, üretilmesinin ve anlaşılmasının daha zor olduğu ilgili alan yazındaki bulguları desteklemektedir.

References

  • Aksu Koç, A. A. and Slobin, D. I. (1985). Acqusition of Turkish. In (D. I. Slobin, Ed.) The cross-linguistic study of language acqusition, Vol. 1: The data. (839-878) Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrance Erlbaum Associates.
  • Andrews, A. D. (2007). Relative clauses. In (T. Shopen, Ed.) Language typology and syntactic description 2, 206–236 (2nd ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Baysal, A. (2001). A study on restrictive relative clauses with particular reference to data triangulatation in ELT research. Anadolu Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 1(1), 129-146.
  • Bergen, B. and Chang, N. (2005). Embodied construction grammar in simulation-based language understanding. Construction Grammars: Cognitive Grounding and Theoretical Extensions, 3, 147-190.
  • Bod, R. (2006). Exemplar-based syntax: How to get productivity from examples. The Linguistic Review, 23(3), 291-320.
  • Boran, B. (2018). The role of context on processing of Turkish subject and object relative clauses. Unpublished master thesis, Hacettepe University, Ankara.
  • Brown, J. D. and Rodgers, T. S. (2002). Doing second language research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Cagri, I. M. (2009). Arguing against subject incorporation in Turkish relative clauses. Lingua, 119(2), 359-373. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
  • Comrie, B. (1981). The formation of relative clauses. In (B. Lloyd and J. Gay, Ed.) Universals of Human Thought: Some African Evidence, 215–233. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Croft, W. (2001). Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • De Vries, M. (2002). The syntax of relativization. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Utrecht, Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics.
  • Diessel, H. (2004). The acquisition of complex sentences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Diessel, H. (2007). Frequency effects in language acquisition, language use, and diachronic change. New Ideas in Psychology, 25(2), 108-127.
  • Diessel, H. and Tomasello, M. (2005). A new look at the acquisition of relative clauses. Language, 81(4), 882-906.
  • Erdoğan, A. G. V. (2005). Use of English relative clauses by Turkish learners: A study of errors. Çukurova Üniversitesi Eğitim Fakültesi Dergisi, 3(2), 22-28.
  • Gennari, S. P. and MacDonald, M. C. (2008). Semantic indeterminacy in object relative clauses. Journal of Memory and Language, 58(2), 161-187.
  • Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 69, 1-76.
  • Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. University of Chicago Press.
  • Goldberg, A. E. (2006). Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford University Press on Demand.
  • Göksel, A. and Kerslake, C. (2004). Turkish: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.
  • Guasti, M., Vernice, M. and Franck, J. (2018). Continuity in the adult and children’s comprehension of subject and object relative clauses in French and Italian. Languages, 3(3), 24.
  • Gutierrez Mangado, M. J. (2011). Children's comprehension of relative clauses in an ergative language: the case of Basque. Language Acquisition, 18(3), 176-201.
  • Hamilton, R. (1994). Is implicational generalization unidirectional and maximal? Evidence from relativization instruction in a second language. Language Learning, 44, 123- 157.
  • Hamilton, R. L. (1995). The noun phrase accessibility hierarchy in SLA: Determining the basis for its developmental effects. In (F. Eckman, D. Highland, P. W. Lee, J. Mileham and R. Weber, Eds.) Second Language Acquisition Theory and Practice, 101–114. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  • Hawkins, J. (1999). Processing complexity and filler-gap dependencies across grammars. Language, 75, 244-285.
  • Kayne, R. S. (1994). The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
  • Keenan, E. and Comrie, B. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and Universal Grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8, 63-100.
  • Kim, J., and Won, E. (2020). Effects of inductive and deductive grammar instruction based on the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy: on Korean efl middle school students. Language & Literature, 46, 169-197.
  • Klein, W. and Perdue, C. (1997). The basic variety (or: Couldn't natural languages be much simpler?). Second Language Research, 13(4), 301-347.
  • Koçak, A. (2020). Turkish tertiary level EFL learners’ recognition of relative clauses. Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, 16(4), 1637- 1655.
  • Kornfilt, J. (1997a). Turkish. London: Routledge.
  • Kornfilt, J. (1997b). On the syntax and morphology of relative clauses in Turkish. Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi, 8, 24-51.
  • Kornfilt, J. (2000a). Some syntactic and morphological properties of relative clauses in Turkish. In (A. Alexiadou, P. Law, A. Meinunger and C. Wilder, Eds.) The Syntax of Relative Clauses, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 121-159.
  • Kornfilt, J. (2000b). Locating relative agreement in Turkish and Turkic. In (C. Kerslake and A. Göksel, Eds.) Studies in Turkish and Turkic languages, 189-196. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
  • Larsen Freeman, D. (1997). Chaos/complexity science and second language acquisition. Applied Linguistics, 18(2). 141–165.
  • Larsen Freeman, D. and Lynne C. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Lehmann, C. (1986). On the typology of relative clauses. Linguistics, 24(4). 663–680.
  • MacDonald, M. C. and Christiansen, M. (2002). Reassessing working memory: comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1999). Psychological Review, 109, 35-54.
  • Mackey, A. and Gass, S. M. (2015). Second language research: Methodology and design. Routledge.
  • O’Grady, W. (2011). Relative clauses: Processing and acquisition. In (E. Kidd, Ed.) The Acquisition of Relative Clauses: Processing, Typology, and Function, 13–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
  • O’Grady, W., Lee, M. and Choo, M. (2003). A subject-object asymmetry in the acquisition of relative clauses in Korean as a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 433-448.
  • Ördem, E. (2017). Acquisition of Zero Relative Clauses in English by Adult Turkish Learners of English. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 5(1), 190-195.
  • Ördem, E., Özezen, M. Y., Darancık, Y., Mavaşoğlu, K. and Hadutuğlu, K. (2018). Syntactic variation of zero object (non-subject) relative clauses: A cross-linguistic perspective. International Journal of Language Academy, 6(5), 391-401.
  • Özçelik, Ö. (2006). Processing relative clauses in Turkish as a second language. Doctoral dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, PA, The United States of America.
  • Paluluoğlu, N. Ş. (2017). Syntactic processing differences and the effects of memory-load interference for object relative and subject relative clauses in Turkish. Unpublished master thesis, University of Yeditepe, İstanbul.
  • Reali, F. (2014). Frequency affects object relative clause processing: Some evidence in favor of usage‐based accounts. Language learning, 64(3), 685-714.
  • Reali, F. and Christiansen, M. H. (2007). Word chunk frequencies affect the processing of pronominal object-relative clauses. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 60(2), 161-170.
  • Ross, J. (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. Doctoral dissertation, MIT. Reprinted as Infinite Syntax! (1986). Norwood, New Jersey: ABLEX Publishing Corporation.
  • Smith, C. (1964). Determiners and Relative Clauses in a Generative Grammar of English. Language 40(1), 37-52.
  • Tabor, W., Juliano, C., and Tanenhaus, M. K. (1997). Parsing in a dynamical system: an attractor-based account of the interaction of lexical and structural constraints in sentence processing. Language and Cognitive Processes, 12(2), 211-272.
  • Tarollo, F. and Myhill, J. (1983). Interference and natural language processing in relative clauses and wh-questions. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 14, 39-70.
  • Turan, C. (2012). Degree of access to universal grammar / transfer from L1 in the learning of relative clauses by Turkish learners of English. Unpublished master thesis, University of Hacettepe, Ankara.
  • Turan, C. (2018). An eye-tracking investigation of attachment preferences to relative clauses in Turkish. Unpublished Doctoral dissertation, University of Hacettepe, Ankara.
  • Underhill, R. (1972). Turkish participles. Linguistic Inquiry, 3, 87-99. Underhill, R. (1976) Turkish grammar. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press.
  • Uzundag, B. A. and Küntay, A. C. (2019). The acquisition and use of relative clauses in Turkish-learning children's conversational interactions: a cross-linguistic approach. Journal of child language, 46(6), 1142-1168.
  • Van Schaaik, G. (2020). The Oxford Turkish grammar. New York: Oxford University Press.
  • Wiechmann, D. (2015). Understanding relative clauses: A usage-based view on the processing of complex constructions (Vol. 268). Walter de Gruyter GmbH and Co KG.: Berlin.
  • Wilson, W. (1963). Relative Constructions in Dagbani. Journal of African Languages, 2(2), 139-144.
  • Yas, E. (2016). Acquisition of English relative clauses by German L1 and Turkish l1 speakers. Doctoral dissertation, Südwestdeutsche Verlag für Hochschulschriften, Germany.
  • Young, S. K. (2018). Relation between frequency and processing difficulty of English relative clauses by l2 learners: a learner corpus analysis. 언어연구, 34(3), 491- 504.
  • Yumrutaş, N. (2009). Acquisition of relative clauses in Turkish. Unpublished MA thesis, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul.
  • Yun, J., Chen, Z., Hunter, T., Whitman, J. and Hale, J. (2015). Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages. Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 24(2), 113-148.
There are 62 citations in total.

Details

Primary Language English
Subjects Linguistics
Journal Section Linguistics
Authors

Eser Ordem 0000-0001-9529-4045

Publication Date June 1, 2021
Submission Date January 14, 2021
Published in Issue Year 2021

Cite

APA Ordem, E. (2021). THE ADULT SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS’ ACQUISITION AND PRODUCTION OF SUBJECT-OBJECT RELATIVE CLAUSES. Çukurova Üniversitesi Türkoloji Araştırmaları Dergisi, 6(1), 106-124. https://doi.org/10.32321/cutad.861485