A Study Of Working Memory Capacity And High School Students’ Acquisition Of English Pronoun Under The Delay Of Principle B Effect

In the literature,there is no consistent conclusion as to whether the delay effect of Principle B exists in second language learners’ English pronoun acquisition.Some scholars believe that there is the delay of Principle B in the acquisition of English pronouns,and it is more difficult to acquire pronoun than reflexive pronouns(Finer & Broselow,1986;Marinis& Chondrogianni,2011;Kim et al.,2015).But other researchers think that second language learners do not have the delayof Principle B effect in English pronoun acquisition(White,1998;Yang Yanqin,Yu Shanzhi,2011;Wu Mingjun,Pan Juan,2018).And Reinhart(2006),a foreign scholar,explained the reason for the delay of principle B effect from the perspective of cognition,and believed that the limitation of working memory capacity was one of the reasons for the delay of principle B effect.So for above reasons,96 senior one school students in Zhangzhou city were selected as the research subjects.E-Prime software was used for online working memory capacity test and online picture truth judgment test to investigate their resolution of pronouns and reflexive pronouns.Two way ANOVA,three way ANOVA and paired sample t test were used to analyze the data to answer the following questions:(1)How about the acquisition of pronouns and reflexive pronouns of senior high school students with different working memory capacity?(2)Whether senior high school students with different working memory capacities acquire reflexive pronouns better than that of pronouns,that is,do high and low working memory capacity middle school students have a delay of Principle B effect phenomenon?The results are as follows:(1)In the online picture truth judgment,the two-way ANOVA with score as the dependent variable showed that the main effects of group and sentence pattern reached a significant level,with F(1,263)=26.420,p=0.000 and F(2,263)=42.707,p=0.000;while the interaction effect between group and sentence pattern was not significant,with F(2,263)=0.833,p=0.436.The mean scores of bi-clausal sentences,bi-clausal nonfinite sentence and mono-clausal sentences were 5.99,5.65 and 4.18 respectively.Multiple comparisons between groups showed that there were significant differences between mono-clausal sentence and bi-clausal finite sentence,between mono-clausal sentence and bi-clausal nonfinite sentence,while there were no significant differences between bi-clausal finite sentence and bi-clausal nonfinite sentence.In the two-way ANOVA with reaction time as the dependent variable,the main effects of group and sentence pattern also reached a significant level,with F(1,2111)=26.159,p=0.000 and F(1,2111)=22.712,p=0.000;while the interaction effect between group and sentence pattern was not significant,with F(1,2111)=0.612,p=0.542.The mean reaction times were 1167.69 ms,1191.64 ms and 1269.08 ms in the above sentences respectively.Multiple comparisons between groups showed that there were significant differences between mono-clausal sentence and bi-clausal finite sentence,and between mono-clausal sentence and bi-clausal nonfinite sentence,while there were no significant differences between bi-clausal finite sentence and bi-clausal nonfinite sentence.(2)In the three-factor ANOVA with score as dependent variable and genre,sentence pattern and distance as independent variables,the main effect of genre in high working memory capacity group is not significant,with F(1,251)=0.076,p=0.783;the main effect of genre in low working memory capacity group is not significant,with F(1,275)=0.013,p=0.909.In the three-factor ANOVA with reaction time as dependent variable and genre,sentence pattern and distance as independent variables,the main effect of genre in high working memory capacity group has not reached a significant level,with F(1,1007)=0.962,P=0.327;the main effect of genre in low working memory capacity group also has not reached a significant level,with F(1,1103)=0.090,p=0.764.The results show that:(1)High school students with different working memory capacity have significant differences in score and reaction time of resolution of pronouns and reflexive pronouns in three sentence patterns.The resolution of bi-clausal sentences is better than that of mono-clausal sentences,and between bi-clausal finite sentence and mono-clausal sentence,there are significant differences in scores and reaction time.Bi-clausal nonfinite sentence and Mono-clausal sentence also are significantly different.(2)Both senior high school students in high working memory capacity and low working memory capacity follow the principle B in pronoun acquisition and resolution,which shows that for the acquisition of pronouns does not lag behind that of reflexive pronouns,namely,there is no the Delay of principle B effect phenomenon.Therefore,it is suggested that teachers should know the characteristics of students’ working memory capacity which should be improve in some ways.Secondly,teachers can enhance students’ grammatical awareness and teach binding theory and phrase theory appropriately.Thirdly,teachers should also enrich their teaching methods and teach and train the resolution of pronouns and reflexive pronouns in different sentence patterns.