抄録
The present study (a) investigates Japanese EFL learners' cue dependencies in sentence interpretation (Section 1), (b) tests the Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis proposed by Oshita (2001) concerning the acquisition of the unaccusative/unergative verbs (Section 2), and (c) examines how differences in cue dependencies might affect learners' distinction of the unaccusative/unergative verbs (Section 3). To these ends, three types of test were administered to 113 participants, i.e., a grammatical proficiency test, a cue dependency test, and a grammaticality judgment test focusing on the unaccusative/unergative distinction. Comparison of the learners' test performances in the grammatical proficiency test and in the cue dependency test showed a strong correlation, which indicated that proficient learners depended more on syntactic cues, displaying target language cue dependency, while less proficient learners depended more on pragmatic cues, which implied they were more dependent on the strategy in their first language to interpret the target language sentences. The results of the grammaticality judgment test only partially supported the prediction of the Unaccusative Trap Hypothesis, and an implicational hierarchy was observed among the target sentence categories. We will discuss a possible interpretation of this implicational hierarchy, taking into account the difference in cue dependency.
