Abstract
With Truth Value Judgement Task, the thesis aimed to explore (1) how English second language learners of Mandarin and Mandarin second language learners of English interpret backward anaphora sentences with ‘while’ and ‘because’ in both Mandarin and English; (2) are Mandarin and English speakers constrained by Overt Pronoun Constraint; (3) if the results support the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis, the Full Access without Transfer Hypothesis, and Interface Hypothesis. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 suggest that English second language learners of Mandarin interpret backward anaphora sentences with ‘while’ differently with Mandarin native speakers. While Mandarin native speakers disallow the coreference readings, second language learners allow. Mandarin second language learners of English interpret backward anaphora sentences similarly to English native speakers. In Experiment 3 and 4, the results show that Mandarin native speakers are not constrained by Overt Pronoun Constraint. Both English and Mandarin second language learners allow coreference reading with sentences containing quantified antecedent and wh- word. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 support the Full Access without Transfer Hypothesis; the initial state in second language acquisition is the same as the initial state in first language acquisition.