Abstract This paper reports on an experimental study that investigates the influence of the disparity between English and Arabic on second language acquisition, namely the phenomenon of the acquisition of the English dative alternation by Arab learners. The disallowance of certain Arabic verbs to occur in the double object dative structure causes difficulty for Arab learners to acquire English as far as the acquisition of the dative alternation is concerned. The experiment is devised to examine whether Arab learners are sensitive to syntactic and semantic properties associated with the English dative alternation. The experiment involved picture tasks with two structures: the prepositional dative structure and the double object dative structure. Overall, the results of the experiment show that the L2 learners failed to acquire the double object dative structure which does not exist in their L1. Based on these results, it is argued that L1 has an important effect on the acquisition of L2.

中文翻译：

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阿拉伯语为母语的英语母语替代的第二语言习得

摘要本文报道了一项实验研究，该研究调查了英语和阿拉伯语之间的差异对第二语言习得的影响，即阿拉伯学习者习得英语和格交替现象。在双重宾语和格结构中不允许出现某些阿拉伯语动词，这使得阿拉伯学习者在获取和格交替方面难以掌握英语。该实验旨在检查阿拉伯学习者是否对与英语和格交替有关的句法和语义特性敏感。实验涉及具有两种结构的图片任务：介词宾格和双宾格。总体，实验结果表明，二语学习者未能获得二语习得结构，而二语习得结构在他们的母语中并不存在。基于这些结果，认为L1对L2的获取具有重要影响。