Chinese Children's Acquisition of English Transferred Negation:A Case Study with the Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition
English transferred negation is one of the challenges Chinese children face in acquiring English.Currently,there is a dearth of research in this field,accompanied by limited research methods,particularly longitudinal case stud-ies.Furthermore,the learning outcomes of transferred negation have been unsatisfactory.This study conducted a 13-month longitudinal study of a Chinese child,referred to as A,who lived with his parents in Australia and attended a lo-cal primary school.The research was divided into six stages,and a corpus was established to analyze the data.The re-sults revealed that the Chinese child's acquisition of English transferred negation was primarily based on a prototypical high-frequency exemplar and gradually expanded around it.This aligns with the mechanism that children's second lan-guage acquisition is based on prototypical high-frequency exemplars.The child made errors in his early acquisition of English transferred negation due to a mechanism of"entrenchment,mingling,and associate entrenchment".While high-frequency constructions facilitated language acquisition through entrenchment,they also gave rise to errors when min-gled with relevant constructions.These errors prevailed in competition because of the associate entrenchment mecha-nism,and ultimately resulted in persistent errors.The implications for Chinese children's second language acquisition involve three aspects:firstly,utilizing the anchoring effect of prototypical high-frequency exemplars to facilitate lan-guage acquisition;secondly,being cautious about the acquisition errors arising from the mingling of prototypical high-frequency exemplars and relevant constructions;and lastly,carrying out timely intervention to address acquisition errors and avoid associative entrenchment.
transferred negationchildren's acquisition of Englishsecond language acquisitionassociate entrenchment mechanismhigh-frequency constructions
万方数据
维普
