TAJIMA Yayoi

It has long been debated whether the process of L2 learning is similar to that of LL Some hypotheses assert that L2 learners as well as Ll speakers have a sort of innate apparatus for language acquisition, like LAD posited by Chomsky in the field of Ll studies. Others suggest that the process ofL2 learning should be divergent depending on the Ll background. This study is intended to explore the differences between Ll and L2 in the acquisition process of English relative clauses. Two experiments were conducted-one with English-speaking children aged 7 (n = 24) and another with Japanese L2 learners of English (n = 35). The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) corpus was used to investigate the frequency of relative clauses in the natural utterances of children (Ll English), while forced-choice, fill-in-the-blank questions were designed to measure how accurately Japanese L2 learners acquire the form and function of relative clauses. As a result, there was no difference found between the frequency of object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) and that of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) in natural utterances of English-speaking children. In contrast, Japanese L2 learners of English were clearly found to have much more difficulty in mastering ORCs than SRCs(p ＜ .01). These findings are taken to indicate that there exists a process ofL2 acquisition, which is different from that of Ll.