What English - speaking Learners of Chinese Don ’ t Know about Dou : A Study on the Acquisition of ‘ 都 ’ 2012

This study investigates how English-speaking learners of Chinese perceive sentences correctly using , incorrectly using , correctly omitting , and erroneously omitting through a grammaticality judgment task. The test results show that English-speaking learners of Chinese have difficulties in accepting grammatical sentences using where the NP associated with is the object of the sentence. Chinese learners failed to reject ungrammatical sentences in which an obligatory was missing. Most of the Chinese learners were not fully aware of the syntactic constraints of and thus could not reject ill-formed sentences that violate the syntactic constraints of in a native-like manner. It is suggested that more emphasis be placed on clarification of the syntactic constraints associated with the use of and the obligatory use of . Exercises targeting sentences in which quantifies the object of the sentence as well as sentences in which the use of is obligatory-both of which are largely ignored in some widely used textbooks in the U.S. --, should be designed and included in CFL teaching.