本研究旨在探討以中文為母語的學生對英語條件句之第二語言習得，主要的議題包括是否有第一語言轉移(L1 transfer)的現象、習得次序、題型效應、組別效應以及英語能力對此結構習得的影響。本研究分兩個部分，第一部分是實證性研究，第二部分為語料庫研究。為了避免潛在的實驗效應，實證性研究採用兩個實驗題型：文法判斷題與引導式翻譯題；試題以單句和情境式對話呈現。受試者為六十位以中文為母語的大一學生，依據其英語程度，分為初、中、高三組。語料庫研究則採當代美國英語布朗大學標準語料庫，探討分析英語母語人士對條件句的使用，並與實證性研究結果相互對照。
實驗結果顯示，受試者在表達英語條件句時，的確受到第一語言轉移以及第二語言複雜度的影響。其中，初階學習者在條件句表達中有較多受母語影響的錯誤，隨著英語能力的增加，此類型錯誤大幅降低，轉為受第二語影響的錯誤。根據受試者的表現，在七種條件句中，預測條件句(predictive conditional)表現最好，最易習得；受試者感到最困難的是未來假設條件句(future hypothetical conditional)以及時態混合型反事實條件句(mixed-time-reference counterfactual conditional)。在題型效應方面，受試者在文法判斷題的表現比引導式翻譯題好，顯示此結構之理解優先於其表達；然而，受試者在單句和情境式對話中的表現無顯著差異。在組別效應方面，三組受試者對英語條件句的表現有顯著差異，顯示受試者對於條件句的習得會隨著英語能力的提升而改善。語料庫研究結果顯示，英語母語人士使用越少之條件句對受試者而言，亦是最難之結構。

In second language acquisition, English conditionals are regarded as one of the most difficult constructions (Covitt 1976). However, little research has conducted an empirical study on the competence and performance of Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition on conditional sentences. Therefore, the present study aims to conduct an integrated study to investigate Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English if-conditionals. A comprehension task (i.e. grammaticality judgment task) and a production task (i.e. elicited translation task) were employed, both of which were presented in two formats (in isolation and in context). Factors such as L1 transfer and L2 proficiency were examined. The subjects were sixty college freshmen in Taiwan, and they were further divided into three groups according to their English proficiency levels. In addition, a corpus study was conducted by examining the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English to compare with the findings of the empirical study.
The results show that the seven conditional types exhibited different degrees of difficulty. The predictive conditional was found the easiest type, followed by present hypothetical and present counterfactual conditionals. In addition, the past counterfactual as well as the factual conditionals were found challenging and the future hypothetical and mixed-timed-reference counterfactual conditionals were the most difficult to acquire. Syntactic and semantic complexity along with L1 transfer accounted for the subjects’ developmental patterns. As for the task effects, the performance on the comprehension task were better than their performances on the production task; they did not perform significantly better on the tasks contextual cues. With regard to L2 proficiency, the present findings indicate that the subjects at higher L2 proficiency levels performed better than the lower proficiency groups. In addition, the subjects of lower L2 proficiency made more interlingual errors while those of higher L2 proficiency produced more intralingual errors. Finally, the corpus findings show that the conditional type rarely used was likely to be more difficult for the subjects in the present study.

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