Papers by Alessia Cherici
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
This study investigated whether L1-English Chinese learners show a subject preference in their or... more This study investigated whether L1-English Chinese learners show a subject preference in their oral production of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) and whether they show animacy effects. We conducted a picture-based elicited production experiment that compared subject and object RCs, varying the object animacy between animate and inanimate. The results from thirty learners showed more targetlike performance in subject RCs than in object RCs, both at group and individual levels, regardless of object animacy. Error analyses revealed that more object RCs were converted into subject RCs than vice versa. These results point toward a clear subject preference despite conflicted findings in previous research on RCs in Chinese as a foreign language. Animacy influenced subject and object RCs alike: both types were easier to produce when featuring an inanimate object. We suggested similarity-based interference or distribution-based effects to account for this finding.
This study expands on Xiao and McEnery’s (2004) theory of aspect by investigating the interaction... more This study expands on Xiao and McEnery’s (2004) theory of aspect by investigating the interaction of qilai, whose main function is that of directional Resultative Verb Complement (RVC) meaning ‘up/upward,’ with verbal aspect and situation types. One hundred and fifty utterance featuring states, i.e. adjectival predicates, co-occurring with qilai were examined from lexical, sentential, and pragmatic perspectives. The data were retrieved from the Weibo collection included in the BCC Corpus (Beijing Language & Culture University Corpus Center). The survey revealed that when adjectival predicates occur with qilai, they undergo a situation-type change, from states to processes, therefore qilai should not be considered only an inceptive marker focusing on initial point, ingressive dynamicity and continuity, as proposed by Xiao and McEnery, but perhaps also a “situation-type-change marker.” This study aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the rather understudied structure ‘adject...
The role of L1 and L2 in the acquisition of null subjects by Chinese learners of L3 Italian
International Journal of Multilingualism
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Papers by Alessia Cherici