Effect Of Working Memory Capacity On The Processing Of Object Relative Clause And Appositive Clause In Senior High School Students

The object relative clauses and appositive clauses are two very similar sentence patterns,the only difference between them is that the different components behind the verb of the subordinate clause,among which the former is embedded with interjections,while the latter is embedded with noun phrases.L2 learners often confuse two of them.In addition,many studies have found that working memory,as a cognitive resource,has an impact on the sentence processing of second language learners.This paper takes senior high school English learners as the research subjects to investigate the effects of working memory capacity on the processing of object relative clauses and appositive clauses by using a self-paced paradigm and operation span task and intends to answer the following questions:（1）What are the differences and processing characteristics of English object relative clauses and appositive clauses in high school students with different working memory capacities?（2）Does working memory capacity have any effect on processing object relative clauses and appositive clauses in high school students? If so,is it object relative clauses preference or appositive clauses preference?The results show that,firstly,in the sentence reading judgment score,the subjects of high and low working memory groups have higher average scores in the object relative clauses than that in the appositive clauses.The results of two-factor ANOVA show that the main effect of clause type is significant,but the main effect of working memory capacity and the interaction effect between working memory capacity and clause type is not significant.Secondly,the descriptive statistics of the clauses processing reaction time show that subjects process object relative clauses faster.The paired sample T test shows that there are three key regions indicate the significant differences in the response time of these two sentence patterns,which are the position of the embedded component between the verb of subordinate clause and the matrix clause,the matrix clause Be verb and the final adjective.The reaction time on these three key regions is regarded as the dependent variable and working memory capacity and clause type are regarded as the independent variables to carry out the two-factor ANOVA.The main effect of working memory capacity and clause type is significant in the three key regions,but the interaction effect of working memory capacity and clause type is not significant.The results above indicate that,similar to previous studies,the subjects experience superiority when processing object relative clauses,with a faster reading speed.And this processing difference reflects the gap-filled effect,which also supports the active filler strategy.In addition,the level of working memory capacity does not affect the comprehension of sentence accuracy,but affects the processing speed of clauses,no matter what sentence pattern is processed,subjects with high working memory capacity have shorter response time,and the result conforms to the working memory capacity limitation theory.Therefore,firstly,it is suggested that educators can consciously integrate work memory training tasks into the English classes,effectively improve students’ ability to store and process information;Secondly,from the perspective of working memory,the appropriate teaching contents and methods should be selected according to the characteristics of students’ memory.Thirdly,in order to reduce the consumption of cognitive resources,the processing difficulty of clauses can be reduced by appropriately increasing students’ language experience about object relative clauses and appositive clauses.