Acquisition of cleft structures in L1 and L2

Journal of Teaching English Lnaguage Studies

مقاله 5، دوره 1، شماره 4، مرداد 2013، صفحه 68-91   

نویسنده

Maryam Karami^*

Islamic Azad University, Takestan Branch,Iran

چکیده

The  present study aims at exploring the processing difficulty of cleft structures as a type of relative clause for EFL and Persian as  first language learners.The impact of head nouns with various functions as well as that of embedding on the processing of Persian and English cleft structures has been investigated in the present study.The participants  were 68  Iranian male and female students.Two sets of picture selection tests  along with 27 items both in Persian and English were designed for both the Persian and English groups.The  Persian items consisted of 4 different cleft types :  subject cleft, object cleft with resumption ,object cleft with gap and object clitic cleft .The Engliish language included either subject cleft or object cleft type.Results showed that word order has a significant effect on Persian cleft processing of Iranian children.The results also revealed that word order has a significant effect on EFL learners’ processing of English clef sentences.

کلیدواژه‌ها

Cleft Sentence؛ word order؛ Head Noun؛ Relative Pronoun؛ Isomorphim

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