Second language acquisition of Chinese anaphor by the native English speakers

Chinese and English differ in the use of third person anaphor due to the different typological families to which they belong. English is a subject-prominent language in which syntactic constraints primarily determine the choice between a zero and a lexical anaphor. Chinese, on the other hand, is a topic-prominent language in which discourse constraints mostly govern such choice, though syntactic and semantic constraints also play some role. As a result, zero anaphor is widely permitted in Chinese whereas lexical anaphor is the norm in English. Furthermore, Chinese allows many situations where the choice between a lexical and a zero anaphor is optional while English requires an obligatory use of lexical anaphor in most situations. These different anaphor uses pose a great deal of difficulty for second language learners of Chinese (CSL) whose first language is English. It is thus the purpose of this study to discover an anaphoric pattern exhibited by these learners and the factors that determine this pattern.; In this study, we hypothesized that optionality (optional/obligatory selection of anaphor) and language similarity (similar/dissimilar anaphor use in first and target languages) are two important factors that play a significant role in CSL speakers' acquisition of Chinese anaphor. Thirty CSL speakers participated in three experimental tasks that investigated their anaphor use in three linguistic domains. A group of native Chinese speakers also carried out the same experimental tasks to establish baseline data against which to make comparisons.; The results supported our hypotheses that the CSL anaphor pattern is substantially influenced by optionality and similarity in anaphor use. In addition, we found some relationship between experimental task and the impact of the two factors on participants' choice of anaphor. The results of the study also coincidentally show that native Chinese speakers do not always follow what prescriptive grammar says, and their anaphor use is both lexically and task sensitive, suggesting the importance of obtaining accurate native speaker data in the target language tasks when undertaking an experimental study of second language acquisition.