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Lei Zhang
Beijing University of Technology, China
Beijing Foreign Studies University, China

Abstract
This study employs a mixed design to investigate the effects of time factor and clause type on Chinese EFL learners’ implicit and explicit knowledge of relative clauses. Eighty Chinese EFL learners were randomly assigned to one of two-time factor conditions and then tested on a grammaticality judgment task as well as on a sentence combination task to elicit their implicit and explicit knowledge of three types of relative clauses. It was found that, the learners had more accurate performance in untimed tasks than in timed ones; this finding is consistent with some previous studies’ findings. Clause type exerts a significant effect on Chinese EFL learners’ implicit and explicit knowledge of relative clauses, besides time factor and clause type had interaction effects. According to these findings, the article deepens the study of NPAH and it is suggested that multiple timed and untimed tasks could be designed to measure learners’ implicit and explicit knowledge.

Keywords
Clause type, time factor, relative clauses, explicit knowledge,implicit knowledge