A Comparative Study Of Appositive Clause Extraposition And Relative Clause Extraposition Of Chinese EFL Learners

In the field of second language acquisition,there are a few studies on clause extraposition,mainly focusing on English relative clauses,while appositive clauses,whose surface structure is similar to that of relative clauses,have received little attention.This study investigates the factors that affect the acquisition of appositive clause extraposition and relative clause extraposition of Chinese EFL learners,thus revealing the general rules of clause extraposition in second language acquisition.This study adopts an empirical method to investigate clause extraposition triggered by grammatical weight in terms of English language proficiency and clause type.A total of 120 undergraduates and graduates majoring in English are recruited for the experiments and are divided into an advanced group and an intermediate group.Experiment one adopts a forcedchoice task.Participants are asked to choose the more natural sentence from a pair of grammatical sentences that differ only in the order of their constituents,i.e.,extraposed or canonical.In Experiment two,an elicited production task is conducted in which participants are asked to constitute three phrases into one sentence that appear on the screen in a more natural way and to speak out the entire sentence.The phrase that serves as the beginning part of the sentence is placed in the middle of the three phrases and is underlined so that participants would only produce extraposed or canonical sentences.By conducting the experiments,the study attempts to answer the following questions:(1)Are there differences between appositive clause extraposition and relative clause extraposition triggered by phrase length?(2)What factors affect the acquisition of appositive clause extraposition and relative clause extraposition triggered by phrase length?(3)Is there a connection between the clause extraposition and the ease of sentence production for Chinese EFL learners?There are three main findings of the study.Firstly,phrase length(a measure of grammatical weight)affects the acquisition of clause extraposition,confirming the Easy First bias.When VP is short and Clause is long,extraposition is preferred more often;when VP is long and Clause is short,extraposition is preferred less often.It is noteworthy that in two tasks VP length exerts a stronger effect on extraposition than Clause length.Secondly,English language proficiency and clause type influence the choice of structure of clauses.Participants with higher levels of language proficiency tend to choose more extraposed constructions in the production task than those with intermediate levels of language proficiency.The percentage of relative clause extraposition is higher than that of appositive clause extraposition,probably due to different processing difficulties.The results also suggest that participants in the intermediate group have difficulty differentiating between appositive clauses and relative clauses,which supports the proposition that English language proficiency has an effect on the choice of structure of clauses.Thirdly,by analyzing preparation time and voice initiation time,it is found that the structure to which an extraposition is assigned is not the one that is produced most quickly.Therefore,response time cannot reflect the difficulty of sentence production.There is no close connection between the choice of structure and the ease of production for Chinese EFL learners.This study is one of the first to use an experimental method to compare the appositive clause extraposition and relative clause extraposition of Chinese EFL learners,providing methodological insights and empirical results for the study of clause extraposition in the field of second language acquisition.