Effects Of Working Memory And Lexical-semantic Factors On The Processing Of English Ambiguous Relative Clauses In High School Students

In the literature,subjects could attach the relative clause in the sentence “The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter.”to the professor(NP1),or to the secretary(NP2).If subjects attached the relative pronoun to NP1,it would be high attachment,while NP2 would be low attachment.In the current research,researchers have no unified conclusion on whether the working memory,the attachment tendency or the lexical-semantic factors(preposition and attachment)affect the processing of sentences.Therefore,this paper takes 105 students from two classes of Grade Two of a key high school in Xiamen as subjects,and through offline grammar judgment tests the online working memory test to explore the influence of working memory and lexical-semantic factors on ambiguous relative clauses.The above data have been analyzed using the three-factor variance analysis and t-test of social science statistical software SPSS 21.0,in an attempt to explore the following questions: 1)In the off-line test,did lexical and semantic factors affect the processing of ambiguous relative clauses in high school students? 2)In the online test,did working memory and lexical-semantic factors affect the processing of ambiguous relative clauses in high school students? 3)Did high school students use the same syntactic processing principles as native English speakers?The major results of the study are summarized as follows: 1)In the off-line test,paired sample t-test was used to measure subjects' scores of the high and low attachment(NP1 and NP2).The value of the paired t-test is p=0.00 which means lexical and semantic factors(prepositional conditions and dependent types)affect the processing of ambiguity clauses in high school students.2)In the online tests,the response time that affects the process of ambiguous relative clauses is regarded as an dependent variable,working memory and lexical-semantic factors(preposition and attachment)are regarded as independent variables.The paper uses 2×2×2 three factor variance analysis to analyse data and finds that working memory main effect is F(1,55)=294.525,p=0.000,attachment main effect is F(1,55)=0.463,p=0.499,and preposition main effect is F(1,55)=0.246,p=0.622.The interaction effect between working memory and attachment is F(1,55)=7.823,p=0.007,the interaction effect between attachment and preposition is F(1,55)=0.002,p=0.967,and the interaction effect between preposition working memory is F(1,55)=0.815,p=0.317.Among them,the significant values of working memory main effect,and the interaction between working memory and attachment conditions are all less than 0.05,which indicates that working memory and attachment conditions in lexical-semantic factors affect the processing of immediate relative clauses.3)In the off-line test,the paired sample t-test of high and low attachment(NP1 and NP2)p=0.000,indicating that there is a significant difference between high and low attachment,so,high school students use Predicate Proximity Principle,which is opposite to native English speakers'.In the online test,high working memory group(through the online test,scores above 4 points)chose low attachment,and the independent sample t-test of high and low attachment(NP1 and NP2)p=0.000,indicating that high working memory students adopt the Recency Principle,which is the same as English native speakers'.Low working memory group(through the online test,scores below 3 points)chose high attachment,and the independent sample t-test of high and low(NP1 and NP2)p=0.000,indicating that students in the low working memory group adopt the PredicateProximity Principle,which is opposite to native English speakers'.The research shows,1)Connecting relative clauses with high school students attachment,lexical and semantic factors affect the processing of off-line ambiguous relative clauses in high school students.2)Working memory,working memory and attachment affect the processing of online ambiguous relative clauses in high school students.3)In the offline test,high school students use a different syntactic processing principle(PredicateProximity Principle).In the online test,students in the high working memory group use the same syntactic processing principle as native English speakers(Recency Principle),while students in the low working memory group still use a different syntactic processing principle from native English speakers(PredicateProximity Principle).The above findings can be explained byShallow Structure Hypothesis and Capacity Constrained Parsing Model.Therefore,we believe that high school teaching should strive to achieve the following things: 1)Teachers could use diagnostic test to know students' syntactic processing methods before teaching.2)Teachers should understand the characteristics of English syntax to make teaching more targeted.3)Students should be taught scientific memory methods to expand their working memory capacity.4)Teachers should develop students' English thinking ability by comparing with the native thinking.