長期以來，在第二語言習得研究當中，學者對學習年限有不同看法。本文旨在透過英語關係子句的習得，探討學習年限是否會影響不同組別受試者的表現。七十五位台北市立民族國民中學的三年級學生參與此實驗，分為三組：第一組沒有學過兒童美語，第二組平均學過兩年兒童美語，第三組平均學過四年兒童美語。本實驗有三種題型：看圖回答問題(picture-identification)，排列句子順序(ordering)及是非判斷題(grammaticality judgement)。
研究結果發現，學習年限的確影響受試者的表現，沒學過兒童美語的受試者和學過兒童美語受試者的表現有顯著不同。其次，從受試學生的錯誤句型，亦可看出母語轉換(L1 transfer)微乎其微，換言之，在第二語言習得過程中，母語並沒有扮演顯著影響的角色。再者，受試者幾乎都能在短時間內習得英語關係子句，證明普遍語法在第二語言習得中，完全發揮其影響力。至於題型差異方面，研究發現不同題型的確能測出受試者的不同反應。受試者在「排列句子順序」和「是非判斷題」表現的比「看圖回答問題」來得好，但「看圖回答問題」最有鑑別度，最能反映受試者的能力。最後，就語法和語意習得的難易而言，並沒有顯著不同，幾乎可在同時習得。

In the literature of second language acquisition (SLA), the issue of the number of years of learning has been debated for decades (Penfield & Roberts 1959, Liu 1998, among others). In the present study, three tasks (i.e. picture-identification (PID), ordering (OR), and grammaticality judgement (GJ) tasks) were conducted to examine Chinese students' acquisition of English relative clauses (RCs). Seventy-five Chinese students at Min-tsu Junior High School in Taipei City were asked to participate in this study. They were further divided into three groups: Group I (students without the early immersion in English), Group II (students with two years of immersion), and Group III (students with four years of immersion).
The results show that the number of years of learning has impact on subjects' relativization, suggesting that subjects who had early immersion outperformed those who did not. Moreover, our subjects' error patterns show that there is little first language (L1) negative influence. That is, L1 effects were not significant. With regard to the accessibility of Universal Grammar (UG), it was found that the direct-access hypothesis was supported. In addition, the task formats were found to be crucial in determining group variations. Our subjects performed significantly better in the OR task and the GJ task than in the PID task. What is more, the PID task was found the most effective task among the three tasks in tapping subjects' proficiency. Last but not least, subjects' performance on syntactic patterns and semantic features was not significantly different.

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