Psychological Processing Mechanism Of English WH-questions By Chinese English Learners—an ERP Study

As an essential part of English acquisition, WH-questions have aroused increasing attention from linguists. It is meaningful to dig into the comprehension and processing of WH-questions by Chinese English learners. This study aims to make more contribution to the psychological processing mechanism of Chinese English learners with event-related brain potentials (ERPs) recorded. Compared with the effect of semantic factors, the influence by syntactic elements, such as the complexity of sentence structure, filler-gap dependency, and case-marking information, could set forth more requirements for the participants during their processing and understanding. English, a member of Indo-European language family, was taken as the study objective in the present study. The author selected Chinese proficient English learners as the participants in the experiments. Having done an on-line judgment task with the recorded electroencephalograph (EEG) of the grammaticality of WH-questions with long and short dependencies between their fillers and gaps, as well as subject and object extractions, participants were found to produce a sustained left anterior negativity for subject WH-questions with long dependency, whose resource should be the integration memory cost and syntactic working memory. According to the behavioral data which were consistent with the EEG data, subject-extraction WH-questions with long dependency demanded longest reaction time and caused lowest accuracy in the task. Participants showed shortest reaction time and highest accuracy in judging object-extraction WH-questions with short dependency. It manifests that in order to maintain the filler (subject WH-extraction) in memory, working memory load was burdened during processing. It is concluded that working memory and integration cost are the main reasons for the difficulty of complex WH-movement sentences during the processing. The differences between Chinese (L1) and English (L2) also play prominent role in the distinguishable statistics.