Chinese Motion Event Packaging in Chinese-English Bilinguals: The Role of English Experience
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Wu, Jia-lin
Abstract
This study aims to investigate the role of English exposure in the encoding of Chinese motion event in Chinese-English bilingual speakers. Chinese and English have been suggested to belong to different typological families (e.g. Tai 2003, Slobin 2004) in motion events, and are also proposed in the present study to be different in motion element packaging styles. In Chinese, the Ground element (locative NP) in a motion event may be packaged either at the post-verbal position or at pre-verbal position, while in English it is the former that is the favorable package type. Using this construction difference as the testing ground, this study inspects the factors of English proficiency, task requirement and age to see if speakers of different backgrounds will package a motion differently. This study adopts a motion elicitation task in a repeated-measures design. For the factors of English proficiency and age, four groups of participants are selected: Adults of high English proficiency (Adult Advanced), adults of low English proficiency (Adult Beginner), children of high English proficiency (Child Advanced), and children of low English proficiency (Child Beginner). A total of 120 participants are included in this study. The adults are college students, and the children are 10-year-old elementary school students. All participants were asked to describe two sets of motion animation clips in Chinese. The difference between these two sets is that one of them includes English input in the form of English sentence reading and repeating before the motion elicitation. Their responses are coded and analyzed through three perspectives: first, the tendency of post-verbal locative NP packaging; second, the motion event constructions; and third, lexicalized patterns of verbs. The findings are: (1) Participants of both age groups show a preference toward post-verbal locative NP packaging if belong to the advanced English proficiency groups. Based on the bilingual production model of Kroll and de Groot (1997), this tendency may be accounted for by the advanced speakers’ stronger conceptual link between the conceptualizer and L2. (2) The two children groups distinct their performance from each other to a stronger degree than that between the adults. This finding indicates that the age factor is indeed at work and compared with the adults, advanced children’s language system is much more prevalently altered by English. (3) Little to none task effects of English are found, meaning an inutile English input. (4) Participants of different backgrounds show preference on different motion event constructions. Meanwhile, it is also found that children at 10 years old have not showed a complete mastery in encoding motion events.
Subjects
motion event
spatial language
bilingual language acquisition
language processing
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