Influence of Syntactic Knowledge Acqusition and Language Transfer on Dependency of Relative Clauses: Connectionist Simulation

Many studies have been done on dependency resolution of the relative clause attachment, especially in the natural language processing field, but there are still a lot of mysteries about how second language language learners acquire dependency resolution. The present study is a computer simulation of the process of Japanese learners of English on the basis of a connectionist network model to investigate how syntactic knowledge influences the learners’ performance on the acquisition of the relative clause attachment in English. The simulation results indicate a possibility that the acquisition of the fundamental syntactic knowledge can promote learns’ understanding of the choice of the relative clause attachment.