An ERP Study On Dual Representation Of English IF-counterfactual Conditionals By Chinese EFL Learners Of Different Proficiency

Counterfactual thinking,which is contrary to factuality,refers to the construction of hypothetical thinking.This online process of mental representation with two meanings(counterfactual meaning and factual meaning)has aroused great interests of linguists and psychologists.Besides,language proficiency has always been an important factor to Chinese EFL learners during their online process of second language.In addition,the difference in linguistic form between English counterfactual conditionals and Chinese counterfactual conditionals has also added complication to Chinese EFL learners when they acquire English counterfactuals.Therefore,more studies of IF-counterfactuals were carried out before.However,there still lacks more empirical evidence.Previous studies mainly focused on classification and cognitive construction or pragmatic use from the aspect of cognitive,functional and traditional linguistics.In addition,most empirical studies emphasized the difference on native speakers.Therefore,this thesis adopts event-related potentials(ERPs)to investigate whether there is difference among Chinese EFL learners of different proficiency between two conditionals and whether there is interaction effect between factuality and language proficiency.The 44 participants were divided into two groups whereby their English proficiency,22 participants in the high proficient group and the same number in the lower one.At last,19 sets of behavioral data and 13 sets of ERP data were available for each group.Experimental materials were divided into counterfactual conditionals,factual conditionals and fillers,and the factual conditionals were considered as baseline.In the experiment,participants were required to judge whether the sentence is consistent with factuality according to different semantic conditionals.All behavioral data,which consists of RT(response time)and accuracy,as well as EEG data,was recorded and analyzed after experiment.The experiment adopts 2(factuality:counterfactual conditionals,factual conditionals)* 2(language proficiency: low,high)mixed design,and all data was mainly analyzed with repeated measures ANOVA.The results are as follows: 1)factuality or type of sentence has reached significant effect on the process of counterfactual conditionals.In terms of behavioral data,counterfactuals cost more RT than factual conditionals and made more error.ERP data showed that counterfactual conditionals elicited more N400 and it was a sustained negativity,which cost more cognitive efforts than factual conditionals.The difference has mainly occurred in right hemisphere and posterior and anterior(marginally).This result is conformity with dual mental representation argument,which holds that dual meaning has interfered semantic process with semantic competition that increased difficulty in semantic comprehension to get access to both counterfactual meaning and factual meaning.In addition,this result also kind of supported Conceptual Blended Theory and Mental Space Theory with empirical statistics that dual-meaning integration and projection made semantic process more complex,which increased cognitive cost.This paper also found a possible component of LAN which was odd with previous studies on English speakers but occurred in Chinese EFL learners.This possible component may result from different linguistic form between English and Chinese counterfactuals,in that Chinese counterfactuals have no inflected words so learners may resort to syntactic markers in processing complicate dual meaning of counterfactual conditionals.2)This paper also found that English proficiency had main effect on counterfactuals process.Statistics showed that participants with high proficiency cost less RT in both conditionals and made less error than low proficient participants,which is more significant in counterfactual conditionals.Besides,ERP data reflected that high proficient participants elicited more N400 in posterior,which reflected that they cost more cognitive efforts in dual meaning integration in this brain area due to more attention to dual-meaning competition,while low proficient participants were not that attentive to meaning competition.But in anterior,low proficient participants elicited more negative N400 and possible LAN,which reflected that during simultaneous semantic integration,low proficient participants need more cognitive efforts to extract semantic information.This result showed that participants of highproficiency prefer semantic process through context constraints which was more close to native speaker and spend less time in extracting lexicon or phrases,while participants of low proficiency were inclined to process semantic meaning through syntactic judgment and needed more cognitive efforts to integrate semantic information.Besides,the data also showed that the latency of both conditionals in high proficient group was shorter than that of the low proficient group,especially in terms of counterfactuals,which also reflected that participants of high proficiency were more sensitive to dual-meaning process.This result also conformed to working memory theory.But there was no difference in the process of factual conditionals,which reflected that they had the same process strategy for factual conditionals.3)Factuality and language proficiency have certain interaction effect in behavioral data,which can be merely inferred from the accuracy.This means that the more complicated conditionals are,the lower accuracy rate will be,while high language proficiency has resulted in higher accuracy.But no interaction effect has been found in ERP data.