| Chapter 2: | Background Study |
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with some possessed nouns but continued errors with human nouns, as in She reads her book to his brother; Stage V is notable for the correct use of possessive pronouns with all nouns, as in She reads her book to her brother.
Syntactic structures selected for study included interrogatives, negatives, relative clauses, and word orders. As summarized by Larsen-Freeman and Long (1991), the developmental sequence for interrogatives in ESL can be identified into the following stages: Stage 1. Rising intonation, for example, He work today?; Stage 2. Uninverted WH (+/-aux.), for example, What he (is) saying?; Stage 3. Overinversion, for example, Do you know where is it?; and Stage 4. Differentiation, for example, Does she like where she lives?.
As for negatives, Cancino, Rosansky, and Schumann (1978) investigated six Spanish speakers learning English and discovered a common developmental sequence of frequency for four stages: Stage I: “no + X,” as in No this one; Stage II: “don’t + V,” as in My dad no have job; Stage III: “aux-neg,” as in I can’t play the guitar; and Stage IV: “analyzed don’t,” as in She doesn’t drink beer.
The acquisition of relative clauses has also been extensively investigated. Schumann (1980) examined the development of relative clauses in five Spanish-speaking learners of English. He found that relative clauses used to modify the object of a sentence were acquired before relative clauses used to modify the subject of a sentence. In terms of the use of relative pronouns, the following sequence was observed: Omission (as in I got a friend speaks Spanish) → Substitution with a personal pronoun (as in I got a friend he speaks Spanish) → Proper use (as in I got a friend who speaks Spanish).
Based on a number of earlier studies, Keenan and Comrie (1977) suggested an accessibility hierarchy for relative clauses. In a linguistic hierarchy, the related grammatical structures or functions are ordered in such a way that the presence of one structure or function implies the presence of all the structures or functions higher in the hierarchy. This provides an ordering from the most accessible to the least accessible for relative