The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy and Second Language Acquisition : Corpus Analyses

Among second language acquisition researchers, it has been widely accepted that the difficulty of relative clause acquisition is predictable on the basis of the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy(NPAH; Keenan and Comrie 1997). A variety of experimental evidence shows that second language learners conform to the NPAH. However, what those experiments show us most clearly is that the performance of learners mainly linked to the processing difficulty of relative clauses although the interpretation such researches varies. Our corpus analyses first show that NPAH effects are at least in part caused by the skewness of input among relative clauses. Second, Korean young learners not only perform better in subject relative clauses than in object relative clauses, but also acquire subject relative clauses earlier than object relative clauses.