An ERPs Study On The Influence Of Verb Temporal Order On Chinese EFL Learners’ Semantic Expectancy

Cognitive linguistics holds that language is embodied,which means that language is close related to man’s physiological experiences.People will integrate the related embodied experiences to construct semantic expectancy and language expressions when comprehending language.Some researchers holds that verb,as a basic component for the construction of a sentence or a discourse,plays a central role in the processing of sentence and is a main source for the semantic expectancy.In the prediction of sentence,verb has a regular and systematic restriction to the modifiers which could solve the vagueness of temporal structure and establish the coherence of a discourse.Recently,the studies that involve the semantic expectancy mainly focus on the theoretical deduction and are lack of the empirical evidence.Although some empirical studies of the semantic processing also involve the semantic expectancy,there is still lack of direct evidence.Until now,most of the studies of semantic processing focus on the sentence level,and the studies of semantic processing on the lexical level is rare.Thus,from the perspective of the embodied cognition theory,the present study adopts the ERPs experimental technology to study the activation and inhibition of semantic expectancy by the verbs with temporal order.The specific research questions are:(1)What are the effects the temporal order has on the processing of English verbs by Chinese EFL learners?(2)What are the effects the temporal order of verbs has on Chinese EFL learners’ semantic expectancy?The study adopts 2(temporal order: forward and reversed)x 2(relatedness: related and unrelated)within-subject experimental design.The relatedness refers to the relatedness between the targets and the priming verbs.The subjects are 20 postgraduates majoring in English Language and Literature from SISU.This study consists of two experiments which adopt the true-pseudo word judgment task and the word-picture semantic relatedness judgment task respectively.The true-pseudo word judgment task requires the subject to judge whether the target word(eg.jail/jali)is trueor pseudo after watching two priming words with temporal order(eg.rob-arrest/arrest-rob);while the word-picture semantic relatedness judgment task requires the subject to judge whether the target picture is semantically related to the priming words(eg.rob-arrest/arrest-rob).Then,the behavioral data and the ERPs data will be analyzed and compared to investigate the priming differences of the verb temporal order to Chinese EFL learners’ semantic expectancy.The experimental procedure is programmed by the E-prime 2.0,and the behavioral data and the ERPs data are recorded by the Neuroscan 4.5 and the Synaps 2.After that,the ERPs data are analyzed off-line,and the behavioral data are analyzed with SPSS 16.0.The whole experiment is conducted in the Scientific Research Center of Language and Brain.The experimental results are as follow:(1)The behavioral data show that: In Experiment 1,? under the related condition,the response time after the priming of forward temporal order is significantly faster than the response time after the priming of reversed temporal order(p=.000<.05);? under the unrelated condition,the response time after the priming of forward temporal order is significantly faster than the response time after the priming of reversed temporal order(p=.041<.05).In Experiment 2,? under the related condition,the response time after the priming of forward temporal order is significantly faster than the response time after the priming of reversed temporal order(p=.000<.05);?under the unrelated condition,the response time after the priming of forward temporal order and the response time after the priming of reversed temporal order have no significant difference(p=.793>.05).It shows that under the related condition,the forward verb temporal order in Experiment One and Experiment Two promotes subjects’ judgment on the target words and the target pictures,but under the unrelated condition,the effects of the verb temporal order vary.(3)The ERPs data suggest that: In Experiment 1,? under the related condition,there is a significant difference in the processing of verbs with temporal order over the latency and mean amplitude of N200(ps<.05),but there is no significant difference overthe N400(ps>.05).?Under the unrelated condition,there is a significant difference in the processing of verbs with temporal order over N200 and N400(ps<.05).In Experiment 2,? under the related condition,there is a significant difference in the processing of verbs with temporal order over the latency and mean amplitude of N200(ps<.05),and there is a significant difference over the N400(ps<.05).?Under the unrelated condition,there is a significant difference in the processing of verbs with temporal order over the latency and mean amplitude of N200(ps<.05),but there is no significant difference over the N400(ps>.05).Thus,it can be concluded that the temporal order of the verbs exerts significant influence on the processing of the verbs,and the verbs with reversed temporal order require much more cognition efforts than the verbs with forward temporal order do.The ERPs data in Experiment One support its behavioral data and show that the forward order will promote the semantic processing.The ERPs data in Experiment Two support its behavioral data and show that the forward order will promote the semantic processing too.Above all,the verb temporal order will influence Chinese EFL learners’ processing of English verbs and activation of semantic expectancy during the processing.The forward temporal order will promote the processing of English verbs by the Chinese EFL learners.