DETERMING THE BASIS OF THE NOUN PHRASE ACCESSIBILITY HIERARCHY IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUSITION

The present study attempts to determine the theoretical basis of the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy in second language acquisition. Various studies have reported that the order of this hierarchy can be a valid predictor of the difficulty of relative clauses. However, it is unclear whether this difficulty should be attributed to the grammatical function of noun phrases (grammatical relation) or the configurational differences in the relative clause structure. A few articles have reported that learners of English would be more sensitive to configurational distinction than grammatical relation distinction in relative clause production, implying that the former determines the difficulty of relative clauses in comprehension and production. In order to clarify this issue, two experiments were conducted. The results indicated that Japanese learners of English have a tendency to be more sensitive to configurational distinction than to the difference in grammatical relation and the difference in thematic role in both comprehension and production. The implications of these findings and directions for future research are also discussed.