Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-17T22:51:31.505Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Second Language Acquisition of Relative Clauses

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2007

Susan Gass  and
Junkyu Lee
Susan Gass
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Junkyu Lee
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

One of the authors of this commentary conducted her dissertation research (Gass, 1979) on relative clause (RC) acquisition and, with the exception of a pedagogical intervention study (Gass, 1982), has since then participated in the discussion of RC acquisition only from afar. Therefore, the opportunity to provide commentary is particularly welcome. The framework adopted in Gass' earlier work was the earliest formulation of the Keenan and Comrie (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH). In what follows, we build on and extend that earlier work within the context of SLA.

Type
COMMENTARY
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 329 - 335
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Ammar, A. & Lightbown, P. (2004). Teaching marked linguistic structures—More about the acquisition of relative clauses by Arab learners of English. In A. Housen & M. Pierrard (Eds.), Investigations in instructed second language learning (pp. 167–198). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Ansell, B. & Flowers, C. (1982). Aphasic adults' use of heuristic and structural linguistic cues for analysis. Brain and Language, 16, 61–72.Google Scholar
Baker, M. C. (1988). Incorporation: A theory of grammatical function changing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bookheimer, S., Zefiro, T., Gallard, W., & Theodore, W. (1993). Regional cerebral blood flow changes during the comprehension of syntactically varying sentences. Neuroscience Society Abstracts, 347, 843.Google Scholar
Caplan, D. & Futter, C. (1986). Assignment of thematic roles to nouns in sentence comprehension by an agrammatic aphasic patient. Brain and Language, 27, 117–135.Google Scholar
Caramazza, A. & Zurif, E. (1976). Dissociation of algorithmic and heuristic processes in language comprehension: Evidence from aphasia. Brain and Language, 3, 572–582.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (2002). Typology and language acquisition: The case of relative clauses. In A. Giacalone Ramat (Ed.), Typology and second language acquisition (pp. 19–37). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Damasio, A. R. (1992). Aphasis. New England Journal of Medicine, 323, 531–539.Google Scholar
Damasio, A. R. & Damasio, H. (1989). Lesion analysis in neuropsychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eckman, F., Bell, L., & Nelson, D. (1988). On the generalization of relative clause instruction in the acquisition of English as a second language. Applied Linguistics, 9, 1–20.Google Scholar
Fillmore, C. J. (1968). The case for case. In E. Bach & R. T. Harms (Eds.), Universals in linguistic theory (pp. 1–88). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Friederici, A. D. (1995). The time course of syntactic activation during language processing: A model based on neuropsychological and neurophysiological data. Brain and Language, 51, 259–281Google Scholar
Gass, S. (1979). Language transfer and universal grammatical relations. Language Learning, 29, 327–344.Google Scholar
Gass, S. (1982). From theory to practice. In M. Hines & W. Rutherford (Eds.), On TESOL '81 (pp. 129–139). Washington DC: TESOL.
Gass, S. (1987). The resolution of conflicts among competing systems: A bidirectional perspective. Applied Psycholinguistics, 8, 329–350.Google Scholar
Gass, S. (1993). Second language acquisition: Past, present and future. Second Language Research, 9, 99–117.Google Scholar
Goodglass, H. (1993). Understanding aphasia. San Diego: Academic Press.
Grodzinsky, Y. (1984). The syntactic characterization of agrammatism. Cognition, 16, 99–120.Google Scholar
Grodzinsky, Y. (2000). The neurology of syntax: Language use without Broca's area. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 1–71.Google Scholar
Grodzinsky, Y., Piñango, M. M., Zurif, E., & Drai, D. (1999). The critical role of group studies in neuropsychology: Comprehension regularities in Broca's aphasia. Brain and Language, 67, 134–147.Google Scholar
Hamilton, R. (1994). Is implicational generalization unidirectional and maximal? Evidence from relativization instruction in a second language. Language Learning, 44, 123–157.Google Scholar
Harrington, M. (1987). Processing transfer: Lanuage-specific strategies as a source of interlanguage variation. Applied Psycholinguistics, 8, 351–378.Google Scholar
Hickok, G. & Avrutin, S. (1996). Comprehension of wh-questions by two agrammatic Broca's aphasics. Brain and Language, 51, 10–26.Google Scholar
Just, M. A., Carpenter, P. A., Keller, T. A., Eddy, W. F., & Thulborn, K. R. (1996). Brain activation modulated by sentence comprehension. Science, 274, 114–116.Google Scholar
Keenan, E. & Comrie, B. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and Universal Grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8, 63–99.Google Scholar
Kluender, R. & Kutas, M. (1993). Bridging the gap: Evidence from ERPs on the processing of unbounded dependencies. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 5, 196–214.Google Scholar
Piñango, M. M. (2000). Syntactic displacement in Broca's agrammatic aphasia. In R. Bastiaanse & Y. Grodzinsky (Eds.), Grammatical disorders in aphasia: A neurolinguistic perspective (pp. 75–87). London: Whurr.
Sasaki, Y. (1991). English and Japanese interlanguage comprehension strategies: An analysis based on the competition model. Applied Psycholinguistics, 12, 47–73.Google Scholar
Sasaki, Y. (1994). Paths of processing strategy transfers in learning Japanese and English as foreign languages. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 43–72.Google Scholar
Stromswold, K., Caplan, D., Alpert, N., & Rauch, S. (1996). Localization of syntactic comprehension by positron emission tomography. Brain and Language, 52, 452–473.Google Scholar
Zurif, E. B. (1995). Brain regions of relevance to syntactic processing. In L. Gleitman & M. Liberman (Eds.), An invitation to cognitive science: Vol. 1 (2nd ed.) (pp. 381–397). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Zurif, E. B. & Caramazza, A. (1976). Linguistic structures in aphasia: Studies in syntax and semantics. In H. Whitaker & H. Whitaker (Eds.), Studies in neurolinguistics: Vol. 2 (pp. 261–292). San Diego: Academic Press.
Zurif, E. B. & Grodzinsky, Y. (1983). Sensitivity to grammatical structure in agrammatism: A reply to Linbarger et al. Cognition, 15, 207–213.Google Scholar