Markedness and Second Language Acquisition of Word Order in Mandarin Chinese

The study explores the difficulties of native English speakers in acquiring the Chinese word order, aiming to relate it to the markedness theories. According to the Differential Markedness Hypothesis (DMH), the degrees of learner difficulty in second language acquisition can be predicted according to the degrees of typological markedness between learners’ first language (L1) and their second language (L2). The study employs a grammaticality judgment task in which English Chinese learners were asked to judge four categories of sentence types in Chinese: topic comment, pro-drop, locative inversion, and canonical SVO order. Results show that subjects demonstrate a similar pattern of error rates among those four sentences: all learners have higher degrees of learning difficulty in topic-comment and pro-drop sentences, but lower degrees of difficulty in locative inversion and canonical SVO sentences. The study mostly supports the hypothesis, suggesting the instructional importance of realizing the typological markedness relations between the L1 and the L2.