The Effect Of Information Structure On Chinese EFL Learners' Syntactic Processing

Previous studies have indicated that information structure influences English native speakers' processing of syntactic structures.Nevertheless,whether it influences syntactic processing of Chinese English learners remains unclear.Thus the present study was designed to answer the question: does information structure influence syntactic processing of Chinese EFL learners with different proficiency levels? If yes,then how?The present study designed a 2(information structure: new/given)x2(syntactic structure: DO/PO)x2(L2 proficiency: high/low)experiment to answer the research question.A self-paced reading task was adopted in present experiment.Experimental materials consisted of two parts: context sentences(information structure was revealed)and target sentences(both information structure and syntactic structure were revealed).Context sentences were presented before target sentences.Experimental participants were classified into two groups: high proficiency(senior graduate English majors from a certain university in Guangzhou,Guangdong province)and low proficiency(undergraduate English majors of first year from the same university).The experiment leads to following findings: 1)in the stage of early processing(the first object in English dative alternations),either for high proficiency learners or low proficiency learners,they couldn't use neither syntactic knowledge nor information structure that is a kind of cognitive knowledge;2)in the middle stage(the second object in English dative alternations),for low proficiency learners,only syntactic structure was found to play a role,while for high proficiency learners,information structure affected syntactic processing;3)in the stage of late processing(post part of second object),a delayed effect of information structure was observedfor low proficiency learners,while high proficiency learners were able to use information structure till the end of sentence processing.These patterns suggested that information structure as one of the cognitive factors influences Chinese EFL learners' syntactic processing but leads to different performances of high and low proficiency learners with regard to DO/PO sentences on-line processing.Mechanisms of high proficiency L2 learners' syntactic processing were very similar with these of English native speakers'.Specifically,they could activate syntactic knowledge and cognitive knowledge the same time,while the pattern reflected by low proficiency L2 learners suggested that they are primarily confined to process within language domain as a result of limited cognitive resources,and can't process syntactic information and use cognitive knowledge the same time.Results of the experiment can be explained by the Linear Position Hypothesis,and the results also support the Uniform Competition Model(UCM),while partly challenge the Interface Hypothesis.