Acquisition of Chinese passives by deaf learners ; CUHK electronic theses & dissertations collection

The study aims to investigate how deaf learners with impoverished linguistic input in early life acquire Chinese passives and to what extent it impacts their ultimate attainment of the target structures defined in terms of knowledge representations and processing efficiency. While research on how deaf learners acquire syntactic movement remains scanty, available evidence with English, Hebrew, Arabic and Italian as target languages suggests difficulty in acquiring structures derived by A’-movement generally invoked in object relative clauses, object questions, and OVS topicalizations (Friedmann & Szterman,2006, 2011; Friedmann & Haddad,2008; Volpato & Adani, 2009; etc.). ; In this study, we focused on Chinese passives because they involve non-canonical word order (i.e. O-BEI-(S)-V) as well as long distance dependencies. To account for the base-generated NP which is associated with the object of the embedded VP of Chinese bei-passives, Huang(1999) and Huang et al. (2009) argue for A-movement of PROin short bei-passives and A’-movement of a null operator in long bei-passives, assuming that the empty category merges with the embedded V in Chinese bei-passives and is subsequently coindexed with the grammatical subject through control or predication. Semantically, canonical Chinese passives are said to impose constraints on verb transitivity (Huang, 2013),and under some specific conditions, telicity of the embedded VP(Yang, 1995; Yang, 2012), the latter of which usually requires specific verb complement structures. ; Three experiments were designed to investigate these issues.The picture selection task investigated how deaf learners developed knowledge of syntactic derivations involved in long bei-passives and short bei-passives; the grammaticality judgment task tested whether deaf learners acquired knowledge that intransitive verbs, like unaccusative and unergative verbs, are not allowed in canonical Chinese passives; and lastly,the elicited production task investigated deaf learners’ production of verb ...