The Effect Of Working Memory Capacity On Chinese EFL Learners' Attachment Preference Of The Processing Of English Relative Clauses

In recent decades,the study of Relative Clause(RC)attachment preference has been a hot topic in the field of Psycholinguistics and Second Language Acquisition(SLA).During different languages,researchers have discovered different RC attachment preferences.When RC is first processed,researchers only used the information of structure level and found the differences in syntactic processing difficulty under different attachment conditions by measuring the Reaction Time(RT)of subjects with various attachment preferences;but the attachment preference of RC is influenced by many post-syntactic features such as lexical features,semantic-pragmatic features,language proficiency features and Working Memory Capacity(WMC)features.Based on this reality,in recent years,researchers in this field have generally adopted a method of online processing and questionnaire to investigate the influence of diversified post-syntactic features.However,as far as the existing researches are concerned,there have been fewer online processing researches that combine the WMC of subjects with highlighting semantic-pragmatic features of the complex noun phrases.Therefore,this study aims to do an online processing study of English RC attachment preference on Chinese EFL learners on the basis of the self-paced reading task and PowerPoint task.The subjects are freshmen of English major from a university in China.The E-prime 2.0 and PowerPoint are employed in this study.The purpose of this paper is to study the following issues:1.What is the attachment preference of Chinese EFL learners with different WMC when processing English relative clauses? Low attachment or high attachment?2.For Chinese EFL learners with different WMC to process English RC attachment preference,to what extent are they influenced by semantic-pragmatic features?The main conclusions are as follows according to the research results and analysis:(1)There is no significant difference between Chinese English learners with different working memory capacity in processing English relative clauses with ambiguity.From the perspective of accuracy rate,Chinese English learners' online processing of English RC attachment preference will not get better with the improvement of working memory capacity.From the perspective of reaction time,they show a preference of low attachment in online processing of English RC.(2)The processing of relative clauses attachment preference by Chinese English learners with different working memory capacity is affected by semantic and pragmatic features at different levels.From the view of accuracy rate,Chinese English learners with low capacity have lower accuracy rate in online processing of low-attachment English RC than that in high-attachment English RC,while Chinese English learners with medium and high capacity have higher accuracy rate in online processing of low-attachment English RC than that in high-attachment English RC.Judging from reaction time,Chinese English learners in three capacity groups all react faster in online processing of low-attachment English RC than that in high-attachment English RC;therefore,Chinese English learners in three capacity groups show a preference of low attachment in online processing of English RC.From the combination of accuracy rate and reaction time,the online processing of English RC attachment preference by Chinese English learners with low capacity is not affected by semantic and pragmatic features,so semantic and pragmatic features cannot be used to disambiguate;the online processing of English RC attachment preference by Chinese English learners with medium and high capacity is influenced by semantic and pragmatic features,hence,they can employ semantic and pragmatic features easily to disambiguate and have a higher accuracy rate in judging the attachment preference of English RC.Therefore,according to the above research conclusions,this paper proposes that more attention should be paid to the influence of semantic and pragmatic features on the understanding of English RC in English teaching,and some appropriate exercises are necessary for students to improve their working memory capacity.Finally,the limitations of this research and the prospect of future research are given.Theoreticallyspeaking,this study can not only reflect the Chinese English learners' understanding of English RC,but also enrich the second language acquisition from the perspective of language processing.From a practical point of view,this paper takes the different attachment preferences and semantic and pragmatic features of English RC as the starting point,which can deepen learners' attention to semantic and pragmatic features in the teaching of English RC.