A Descriptive Study On The Differences Within/between Chinese Learners’ Knowledge Of Long Distance WH-question And SV Agreement

This study investigated the differences existing in processing long distance wh-question and subject-verb(SV)agreement with singular subjects by advanced Chinese learners learning English as their foreign language(Chinese EFL learners).In this study,we mainly explored this from the following three aspects.First,whether the asymmetry found in previous studies could be borne out in the present study when processing English long distance subject-extracted wh-question and object-extracted wh-question by advanced Chinese EFL learners? Second,when parsing SV agreement with singular subjects,will the advanced Chinese EFL learners be affected by the intervening elements between the subject and the predicate? Third,do advanced Chinese EFL learners face more challenges in the processing of wh-question than that of singular subject-verb agreement,as the BH assumed in the acquisition of morphology and syntax? Recently,many scholars have conducted separate researches on investigating the processing features of English long distance wh-question and SV agreement respectively,while studies exploring the differences between the wh-question and SV agreement are extremely scarce.Hence,the study tried to find out the differences between L2 learners in processing syntactical and morphological structures,based on the theoretical framework of Slabakova’s Bottleneck Hypothesis(BH),that is,compared with syntax,L2 learners face much more difficulties in the acquisition of functional morphology.Two constructions were examined in the experiment,which were respectively,long distance wh-question(subject-extracted wh-question and object-extracted wh-question),and SV agreement(adjacent and non-adjacent).Sixty-two students from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies were participating in my experiment,with English as their major.All the participants have studied English for more than 13 years and they all have passed the TEM 8(Test for English Majors,Band 8).Hence,all of them could be regarded as advanced Chinese EFL learners.A background questionnaire and two tasks,which were an acceptability judgment task and a self-paced reading task,were adopted.After all the participants finished the task,their output was converted into electronic documents.Using E-prime to record the reading time of the online self-paced reading task,and the Likert scale to work out the value of the difference between the grammatical sentence and its ungrammatical counterpart,the data we collected was then processed through SPSS 25.0 for quantitative analysis.In this study,we drew three conclusions.Firstly,when participants were processing English long distance wh-question,there existed an asymmetry between the subject-extracted wh-question and object-extracted wh-question,which was the same as what the English children performed in their L1 acquisition.Additionally,all the participants performed better in subject-extracted wh-question and object-extracted wh-question,which supported the Distance-Based Theory,while rejected the Generalized Theta Attachment.Secondly,when processing SV agreement with singular subjects,participants’ performance was worse if there was an intervening element between the subject and the predicate,which conformed to the Working Memory Retrieval Model,and offered support to related psycho-linguistic research.Thirdly,the results of the self-paced reading task and the acceptability judgment task showed that advanced Chinese EFL learners had a higher accuracy rate when they were judging long distance wh-question than that when they were judging SV agreement,which was consistent with Slabakova’s Bottleneck Hypothesis.One of the reasons for this phenomenon was that the morphological features of-s was of lower perceptual salience than the syntactical features of wh-question,and therefore,the latter was easier to be noticed and acquired.However,different from the Bottleneck Hypothesis,when learners processed SV agreement,they did not show more but fewer problems than processing wh-question.We found in this study that there truly existed a processing difference within and between long distance wh-question and SV agreement.Therefore,these findings may also give some enlightenment on EFL learners’ grammatical teaching and learning,and a pedagogical implication was discussed,that is,it was beneficial for learners to strengthen their focus on practicing grammar.