Acquisition of Reflexives by EFL Students in Taiwan

Abstract

This study aims to address the question of whether L1 properties influence the development of L2 grammars by examining the EFL students' interpretations of English reflexives. Two hundred and fortythree subjects were asked to take both a true-false judgement test and a multiple-choice test; that is, they had to indicate their judgment on the grammaticality of sentences related to Part A of the Binding Theory (Chomsky 1981). Our experimental results not only support the transfer hypothesis, but also indicate that the number of years of learning slightly influences L2 learners in interpreting English reflexives, but the methodological test design differences do not play a crucial role. Finally, it is shown that subjects' responses to the syntactic constructions are determined by the number of antecedents provided in the test sentences.