Interpretation of Binding of Chinese and English Reflexives by Taiwanese College Students

This paper discusses the use of reflexives in Chinese and their relationship to the understanding of English by college students in Taiwan. Altogether, 136 third-year Chinese college students, majoring in English, participated in this study. The students were randomly divided into two groups, each given a test on reflexives in Chinese and English. One group was administered a Chinese reflexive test while the other group was given a corresponding English-version of the test. Chinese speakers demonstrated diverse preferences in each of the following four Chinese syntactic structures: bi-clause, long-distance binding clause, blocking-effect clause, and topic-orientation clause. The results also showed that first language (L1) transfer occurred in second language acquisition of the English reflexives. In addition, the locality condition exhibited different developmental patterns depending on sentence types. Three of the most difficult sentence structures were long-distance binding sentences, control-verb sentences and bi-clause sentences, in which the control-verb was not predicted by L1 interference. Possible explanations for the results of the test in addition to their implications with regard to foreign language instruction are provided.