Noun Phrase Morphemes and Topic Development in L2 Mandarin Chinese: a Processability Perspective

Abstract

Drawing on an information processing perspective, Processability Theory (PT) proposes a hierarchy of five processing procedures that purportedly constrain interlanguage development. Although PT has been applied to interlanguage development across a wide range of languages, little work has been done on Mandarin Chinese. The main study in the area by Zhang (2001) examines the development of eight Mandarin Chinese morphemes in three learners. The current thesis extends Zhang's work on noun phrase (NP) morphology and broadens the scope of analysis to include an aspect of syntactic development, namely, the emergence of topic structures in interlanguage Chinese. Data was collected from learners in two different learning contexts: New Zealand (a foreign language context) and China (a second language context). In the New Zealand study, nine L1 English learners were interviewed regularly over a seven-month period providing longitudinal and cross-sectional interlanguage data. In the China study, fifty-one learners from eleven first language backgrounds were interviewed on a single occasion providing cross-sectional interlanguage data. Data from five L1 English learners from the NZ study and five L1 Japanese learners and five L1 German learners from the China study was used in the thesis. Based on PT, the thesis proposes a five-stage hierarchy of NP and topic development in L2 Mandarin Chinese: Level 1 - single words; Level 2 - -de (GEN), -de (ATT), -de (ADJ) and canonical order; Level 3 - classifiers and adjunct-fronting; Level 4 - de (RC) and topicalisation; Level 5 - the bă-structure. Analysis of the data was carried out using distributional analysis and emergence criteria. Results revealed similarities to Zhang's findings and conformity with the predicted developmental stages for both NP morpheme and topic development such that structures requiring a higher level processing procedure did not emerge before those requiring a lower-level procedure. Moreover, these results were consistent regardless of L1 background (English, Japanese and German) and learning context (Chinese as a foreign or second language). This research provides further support for the predictive and explanatory power of the processing procedures proposed by PT and the role these procedures play in second language development.