산출실험을 통해 알아 본 한국인에 의한 영어 관계절 구문의 습득 연구

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to investigate how Korean adults produce relative clauses in English as a second language. The experiment involves an elicited production task, in which pairs of pictures and stickers of different colors were used. The subjects for the experiment consist of 14 Korean adults. The finding is that relative clauses with a subject gap are easier to acquire than those with an object or dative gap, which is attributed to the fact that subject gaps are easier to link to their head than object and dative gaps, according to the Structural Distance Principle suggested by 0'Grady(1997). This result accords with the finding in first language acquisition that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses in English, which is accounted for by the Structural Distance Principle. This supports the view that the acquisition device operating in first language acquisition also operates in second language acquisition.