A Preliminary Study on Japanese CSL Learners’ Acquisition of Mandarin Potential Expressions

This study aims to investigate Japanese Chinese as a Second Language (CSL) learners’ acquisition of the Mandarin potential complement ‘V bu C’ (V不C), in hope of shedding light on the effect of language proficiency on the language sense of L2 learners. Based on the results of previous studies [1–3], an acceptability judgment test on a 7-point Likert scale is administered to 58 native Mandarin speakers and 62 Japanese CSL learners, divided into two groups based on Mandarin proficiency, to probe whether there are significant differences between groups for the acceptability of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences containing ‘V bu C’ (V不C) and the negative modal verb ‘bu neng’ (不能). The preliminary results indicate a significant difference between the responses of native Mandarin speakers and Japanese CSL learners of all levels for both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences (all ps < .001), implying that learners struggle to discern the usages of ‘V bu C’ (V不C) and ‘bu neng’ (不能). In addition, a significant difference is also observed between the responses of beginning-intermediate and intermediate-advanced Japanese CSL learners (all ps < .05), indicating that the linguistic sense of intermediate-advanced learners is advancing toward that of native speakers, but has not yet reached the near-native level of proficiency.