GRAMMATICAL COMPLEXITY AS A PREDICTOR OF L2 PERFORMANCE.
Item
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Title
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GRAMMATICAL COMPLEXITY AS A PREDICTOR OF L2 PERFORMANCE.
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Identifier
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AAI8222946
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identifier
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8222946
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Creator
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GITTERMAN, MARTIN R.
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Contributor
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Donald Byrd | Robert Fiengo
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Date
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1982
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics
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Abstract
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This study is concerned with the role of grammatical complexity in determining the relative difficulty of a series of related sentential structures among L2 learners of English. It is hypothesized that both children and adults learning a second language will demonstrate consistent orders of difficulty and that the relative difficulty of the target structures is predictable by a measure of grammatical complexity. Assessment of grammatical complexity includes analyses of transformational variants and variation from the basic form (S-V-O). The target structures include sentences containing passive and to-dative, both alone and in combination.;The results of the study reveal consistent difficulty orders for both children and adults in both comprehension and production. Futhermore, none of the predictions based on grammatical complexity were disconfirmed. The ability to comprehend is shown to exceed the ability to produce, with some indication that the gap widens when more complex structures are involved. Adults show somewhat better performance in the production of passive sentences. No significant child-adult differenes, however, are revealed in the comprehension of any of the target structures. In addition, no significant differences are found in the comprehension of reversible and nonreversible passives for either children or adults.;While it is argued that grammatical complexity seems to be the major determinant of the relative difficulty of the target structures, there seems to be support for a joint grammatical-cognitive model of second language difficulty.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Linguistics
