The Difficulty Hierarchy in the Acquisition of English Relative Clauses by Persian Learners

Abstract

Relative clauses, enabling writers to be more specific and making writing more sophisticated, are extremely useful in language teaching instruction. At the same time, they are also very confusing to many learners, scholars and teachers. The present study intended to investigate the Persian learners’ underlying knowledge of 12 types of English relative clauses. It also attempted to see what factors constrain thelearners’ language 
acquisition process. Three predictor hypotheses, namely NAPH, PDH, and SOHH were used in this investigation. The data from 92 non-English major university students were elicited through two tasks of sentence combination test and grammaticality judgment test. The results indicate that the learners’ acquisition of relative clauses is largely constrained by the universal markedness by NPAH, except GEN. The learners largely experience more difficulty in center-embedded relative clauses, which matches PDH. Largely, SOHH is a valid prediction of the learners’ acquisition of relative clauses.