Twenty-seven English-speaking learners of Chinese (the experimental groups) and 20
native speakers of Chinese (the control group) participated in a study that
investigated second language learners' knowledge of reconstruction (NP and
predicate fronted sentences with ziji ‘self’) in
Chinese. Results of a sentence interpretation task indicate that English-speaking
learners of Chinese had knowledge of ambiguity of antecedence of ziji
inside a moved predicate, and lack of ambiguity of antecedence of ziji
inside a moved NP, although such information is not directly available in English.
While the experiment produced evidence that they appeared to have access to
Universal Grammar, English-speaking learners of Chinese bound ziji in
non-movement sentences to an embedded subject, indicating that they mapped the
narrower setting of reflexives in English onto a wider parameter setting of
ziji in Chinese.
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