4. STUDY II—PSYCHOLINGUISTIC EXPERIMENTS
4.2 Methods of L1 Chinese Acceptability Judgment Tasks
4.2.1 Selected Stimuli of Questionnaires C and D
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4.2 Methods of L1 Chinese Acceptability Judgment Tasks
After introducing the first acceptability judgment tasks of L2 English, we then provide some detailed information regarding the second one. Since some studies indicate that L1 Chinese would transfer some specific L1 lexical features, such as the lexical grammatical patterns, e,g., 發生意外 fāshēngyiwai ‘The accident happened’
or意外發生 yiwaifāshēng ‘The accident happened’ (Liu, 2000; Wu & Liu, 2002) or perfective auxiliary selections –著 –zhe versus –了 –le (Liu, 2007), which have been analyzed through corpora analysis in this present thesis, and thus the second acceptability judgment task of L1 Chinese intends to whether the grammatical form rating would be influenced by the L1 transfers brought by the two Chinese perfective auxiliaries –著 –zhe versus –了 –le and Chinese verb-noun grammatical patterns N+V versus. V+N. The stimuli designed in the second task are shown in the next section 4.2.1.
4.2.1 Selected Stimuli of Questionnaires C and D
As for the stimuli used in Questionnaires C and D, they are displayed in Table 4.3. All of the stimuli are sixteen sentences within four groups of Chinese grammatical patterns, and they are arranged and grouped into different Chinese grammatical patterns, including Pattern 1—V+-zhe (e.g., 存 在 著 cúnzà-zhe
‘exist-imperfective auxiliary’), Pattern 2—V+ -le (e.g., 出現了 chūxiàn-le ‘appear- perfective auxiliary’), Pattern 3—N+V (e.g., 意外發生 yìwàifāshēng ‘The accident happened’), and Pattern 4—V+N (e.g., 發 生 意 外 fāshēngyìwài ‘The accident happened’).
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The change is _____ in Taiwan now. (happening) 2. 悲觀的人總覺得世界上一直發生著不公平的事。
Pessimistic people may think that the unfair issues keep ______ in this world.
(occurring)
3. 國人生活壓力造成社會上出現著心理疾病的盛行。
The increasing pressure in citizens’ life makes the prevailing psychological diseases ____. (appear)
4. 民主國家目前仍存在著種族歧視。
The racial discrimination still ______ in the current democratic countries. (exists) Pattern 2-V+ –le
5. 他還不知道發生了什麼事。
He didn’t know what _________. (happened) 6.近年來，社會上發生了許多兒童受虐事件。
In recent years, there are many incidents of child abuse_______ in the society.
(occurring)
7.金融海嘯過後，政治上與經濟上出現了不可預測的因素。
The unpredictable factors _______ after the financial crisis. (appeared) 8.二手煙問題已經存在了很多年，但卻很難徹底解決。
The problem of second-hand smoke has been ________ for several years, while it is really difficult to solve it. (existing)
Pattern 3- N+V
9. 這件意外發生於上午八時三十分。
The accident ________ at 8:30 A.M. (happened) 10. 鄰居必須發揮守望相助的精神才能防止刑案發生。
Neighbors should help each other to prevent the criminal events __________ in the neighborhood. (occurring)
11. 即使病人已經昏迷數日，醫生仍努力搶救，希望有奇蹟出現。
Although the patient has been in a coma for many days, the doctor still made efforts and expected the miracle __________. (to appear)
12. 921 地震暴露了台灣地理環境上的風險存在。
The 921 earthquake uncovered the risk of geographic environment___________ in Taiwan. (existing)
Pattern 4-V+N
13. 高速公路發生車禍。
There is a car accident ________ on the highway. (happening) 14. 如果世界上發生戰爭，人類將無法安心生活。
If there is a war _______ in the world, humans cannot live peacefully. (occurring) 15. 這間老房子因為年久失修而出現許多裂縫。
There are many cracks_____ in the old house that is long neglected and in disrepair.
(appearing)
16. 立法委員指出這項公共工程存在許多缺失。
The lawmakers indicated that many pitfalls _______ in this public engineering project. (existed)
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All of the sixteen stimuli in Table 4.3 were first adapted from the Chinese sentences in the Chinese native speaker corpus (GW 2.0). Then the Chinese sentences were translated into English with the erroneous patterns found in L2 English learner corpora. Take the first sentence 台 灣 正 發 生 著 複 雜 的 變 化 Táiwān zhèng fāshēngzhe fùzá de biànhuà ‘Taiwan now happen-zhe complicated of change’ as example, we translated it into the English sentence The change is _____ in Taiwan now. (expected answer: happening), for we found that the present participle in the subject+be+Ving was frequently misused by L2 English learners. Two versions of the questionnaires were given. Questionnaire C contained the only English sentences for the subjects to rate the grammatical forms, while Questionnaire D contained the English sentences with Chinese translations. For the sentence The change is _____ in Taiwan now. (expected answer: happening), the subjects might highly rate happening and *happened as the acceptable answers, while they were expected to highly rate the correct answer happening only affected by the Chinese grammatical pattern with the imperfective auxiliary 發 生 著 fāshēngzhe ‘happen-zhe’ within the Chinese translation 台灣正發生著複雜的變化 Táiwān zhèng fāshēngzhe fùzá de biànhuà
‘Taiwan now happen-zhe complicated of change.’ In some other examples, such as He didn’t know what _________. (expected answer: happened), the subjects might first highly rate *happen, *happens, and happened as the acceptable answers, while they were expected to highly rate the correct answer happened only affected by the Chinese grammatical pattern with the perfective auxiliary 發 生 了 fāshēngle
‘happen-le’ within the Chinese translation 他 還 不 知 道 發 生 了 什 麼 事 Tā hái bùzhīdào fāshēngle shénmeshì ‘He not yet know happen-le what.’ The way for subjects to rate the grammatical forms in Questionnaires C and D was similar to that of Questionnaires A and B.