The Syntax Of The "three Planes" On The Cognitive Processing Of Chinese Sentences

The research was administered to examine effects of Chinese grammar (syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors) on the sentence processing. Two experiments were carried out to compare Chinese native speakers with Korean and Japanese CFL learners.In experiment 1, all subjects were asked to make agent or patient judgements of sentences which differed in syntactic structures (active construction, ba-construction and topic-comment construction). The results showed syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors all influenced Chinese sentence processing, (a) The semantic factor had stronger effects than the syntactic and pragmatic ones on native speakers, and the syntactic and pragmatic ones had stronger effects on L2. The sentence order is more important than "ba" marker, (b) The agreement between animacy and agent-patient and animal noun had stronger effects, (c) Focus of the sentence could be easier to be cognized .In experiment 2 , all subjects were asked to make memorical judgements of sentences some of which were the same to experiment 1 in the form and the meaning , and some of which were the same to experiment 1 only in the meaning not in the form . The results showed (a) native speakers and L2 learners memorized sentences mainly by the prepositional representation, (b) They displayed somewhat difference in the memory for surface representation, and the surface representation had greater effects on native speakers than on L2.In conclusion, the experimental results were evaluated with regard to the connectonist model which assumes that all factors may be an parallel processing and their effects are based on the strength or degree of their interactions.