한국인 EFL 학습자들의 영어 관계절 이해

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to test the Structural Distance Hypothesis and Linear Distance Hypothesis in relation to the acquisition of English relation clauses. For this purpose, 20 university students in English education participated in a survey and two kinds of experiments were conducted. In the first experiment, Students were asked to solve the five problems of subject RCs and the five problems of direct object RCs within the given time. In the second experiment, the time required to solve the problems was also measured while solving the five problems of subject RCs and the five problems of direct object RCs without time constraints. The results showed that the score of object RCs was a little higher, whether there was a time limit or not. However, the difference was not significant according to t-test. The overall score of subject RCs and object RCs were higher without time constraints than with time constraints. Learners' stress and anxiety were aggravated in time-constrained environments, resulting in lower achievement (Ashcraft & Kirk, 2001; Tohil & Holyoak, 2000). With respect to reaction time, it took 1.56 seconds to find the subject RCs, and 2.18 seconds to find the object RCs on average. It took less time to find subject RCs than object RCs. This is consistent with the Structural Distance Hypothesis that the acquisition difficulty is determined by the structural distance between the antecedent and the space within the relation clause. The t-test confirmed that the difference was significant. In relation to the non-linguistic factors such as grade, experience and TOEIC score, statistic tests using mixed effect model confirmed that they did not affect the accuracy rate nor the reaction time. This is due to the ceiling effect, which resulted from the relatively easy task for the participants.