Language Acquisition

Research on Language Acquisition includes studies on first and second/foreign language. First language (L1) acquisition explores children’s acquisition of their mother tongue. NTNU faculty and students who are interested in child language acquisition have been fascinated with the question of how preschoolers and schoolers acquire Mandarin Chinese as their first language. Task design is concerned with children’s comprehension, interpretation and production. Research topics cover various linguistic aspects: (1) syntactic constructions like clausal and manner questions, if-conditionals, and double object sentences, (2) literal and metaphorical meanings of si, lao, and chou, and (3) speech acts such as apology, compliment response, promising, etc.

Second language acquisition (SLA), as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics, refers to the process by which a second language is acquired. Major issues in SLA research include the study of interlanguage, which is an independent language system consisting of rules in its own right. Emphasis is put on providing proof of universal principles, language transfer, and markedeness. In the past decades, Chun-yin Doris Chen has addressed these aforementioned issues by exploring L2 learners’ comprehension and production of various syntactic constructions in Chinese together with classroom observations. Data collected from participants with different language backgrounds (such as Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, and English) have helped to argue for proposed linguistic universals. For the past few years, Jen-i Li and Miao-Ling Hsieh have studied the acquisition of an array of function words by L2 learners of Chinese based on the data from Learner Corpus - Test of Chinese as a Foreign Language (Learner Corpus - TOCFL). From the analysis of the function words themselves and the errors made by the learners, it has been found that almost all function words have a variety of meanings and functions, some of which are quite similar yet with subtle difference, and this frequently constitutes the learner’s learning difficulty. Learning a function word thus means acquiring not only the knowledge of that function word itself but also its similarities to and differences from other function words. It is hoped that the studies will contribute to the teaching and learning of Chinese as a second language.

Instructor(s):

• Dr. Chen, Chun-yin Doris
• Dr. Li, Jen-i
• Dr. Hsieh, Miao-Ling

Related Course(s) Provided:

• ENC2052 First Language Acquisition
• ENC3014 Research Methods in Child Language Development
• ENC3035 Second/Foreign Language Acquisition
• END2019 Seminar in Applied Linguistics