The acquisition of verb placement in main clause and embedded wh-questions by L1 Russian learners of L2 English

Abstract

The current study investigates the topic of verb placement in the main clause and embedded wh-questions by L1 Russian learners of L2 English and difficulties with its acquisition. For this purpose, the grammaticality judgement task as well as a force-choice study were conducted. The force-choice task showed variability in the preferred placement of verbs in wh-questions among Russian speakers. The grammaticality judgement task involves 62 participants aged 12 to 15, all of whom have Russian as their L1. The study was conducted in the Udmurt Republic, Russia . The methodology included a grammaticality judgement task designed to assess the participants’ ability to distinguish correct from incorrect English sentence structures. The findings revealed that participants demonstrated general proficiency in main clause structures but encountered significant difficulties with embedded wh-questions across all verb types (lexical verbs, lexical be, and auxiliary verbs), even though a forced choice task completed by Russian speakers suggests that different types of verbal elements are preferred in different positions in the L1. The statistical analysis underscored a significant negative correlation between correct responses in main clause wh-questions and embedded wh-questions. This is not surprising, given that the forced-choice task completed by native speakers shows that there is a strong tendency to prefer the same position for the verbal element in both main and embedded wh-questions in Russian. This also suggests that proficiency in main clause structures does not straightforwardly translate to proficiency in embedded clause structures. The force-choice task was made to have a clear view of the preferred word order in the Russian main clause and embedded questions.