Study on Chinese College EFL Learners' Comprehension and Production of English Relative Clauses: Testing Three Hypotheses

Abstract

AbstractThis study considers both comprehension and production of the English restrictive relative clauses (RC) by EFL learners in Chinese context. Different tests were employed respectively in data collection, namely a sentence combination test and a grammaticality judgment test, aiming to test the hypotheses about the acquisition of English relative clauses. The participants were 30 first-year College students randomly selected in a university of Shanxi province. The results showed that Chinese EFL learners do not follow the Orders of RC acquisition predicted by any of the three hypotheses, Parallel Function Hypothesis (PFH), Perceptual Difficulty Hypothesis (PDH), and Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy Hypothesis (NPAHH). They also showed that the participants performed better in the sentence combination test than in the grammaticality judgment test, and in both tests the easiest type of RC is O-DO, and the most difficult ones are O-OPREP and S-IO.