Abstract

In this seminar, I will present the progress of my PhD research project, Second Language Acquisition of Chinese and Thai Nominal Phrases. It will begin with a summary of linguistic phenomena that are foci of my study, namely the word order, the use of classifiers in non-counting contexts and plural markers in Chinese and Thai. Behaviour of the two languages will be contrasted and accounted for under a featural approach. With the goal to find out how the relevant features are acquired by second language learners, a quasi-experimental study with Thai learners of Chinese and Chinese learners of Thai will be conducted, using sentence production and self-paced reading methods. A pilot study of the experiment was conducted with a small group of Thai learners of Chinese in May 2014. Its design and some preliminary results will be introduced and discussed in the seminar.