The Acquisition of Complex Structures: The Case of Child ESL

Yumiko Yamaguchi

Department of English Language, Tokyo Denki University, Tokyo, Japan.

DOI: 10.4236/ojml.2013.33030                

Abstract

This study examines how complex linguistic structures are acquired in child English as a second language. The spontaneous speech producing by a Japanese primary school child, learning English in a naturalistic environment, was audio-recorded regularly over two years and the development of complex syntactic structures containing subordinate clauses was compared with the acquisition of other English morphosyntactic structures as represented within Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, 1998; Pienemann, Di Biase, & Kawaguchi, 2005). Although PT predicts that subordination is acquired at the highest stage in processability hierarchy, the results in this longitudinal study show that some of the subordinate constructions emerge at earlier stages in child ESL acquisition.

Keywords

English as a Second Language; Complex Structures; Subordinate Clauses; Processability Theory; Primary School Child

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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