A Comparative Study Of ORCs And ACs Processing By Chinese EFL Learners

Sentence comprehension has been a central topic in psycholinguistics.Previous studies have paid more attention to the processing of subject/object relative clauses,which are of different filler-gap dependency structures.However,from the perspective of processing,the studies of appositive clauses,which are of the pseudo filler-gap structure and therefore cause the difficulty for L2 learners to distinct them from object relative clauses,are scantier.It is still unclear whether L2 learners can process filler-gap dependency in real time,and whether L2 proficiency affects the difficulty of sentence processing.Therefore,this thesis takes appositive clauses and objective clauses as research objects and adopts the self-paced reading and ERPs experiments to explore the following questions:(1)Do Chinese EFL learners process English object relative clauses and appositive clauses differently?(2)How does L2 proficiency of Chinese EFL learners influence the processing of English object relative clauses and appositive clauses?Sixty two college students participated in the first experiment and were divided into high-proficiency and low-proficiency groups according to their scores of the Oxford Placement test.The experimental results showed that both the low-and high-proficiency Chinese EFL learners process object relative clauses faster,which means this type of sentences is less difficult.Hence the conclusion supports the description of the Active Filler Strategy but rejects the hypothesis of the Dependency Locality Theory.Besides,low-proficiency English learners are not sensitive to the differences in the deep structures of appositive and object relative clauses.By contrast,high-proficiency English learners showed the sensitivity to syntactic difference.Through the phrases decision task,it is found that there is no difference between the two groups without sentential context in the response to the phrases(adjuncts vs.NPs)at the critical regions of two sentences,indicating that the difference in self-paced reading is caused by the difference of difficulty in processing sentence structures rather than the difference in the semantic processing of the phrases.L2 proficiency is an important factor affecting the sensitivity of Chinese English learners to the difficulty of sentence processing.The second experiment made a further investigations into clauses processing through ERPs technology.It involved 28 Chinese EFL learners of low L2 proficiency as participants.The experimental results showed that both the critical components in objective relative clauses and appositive clauses elicited ELAN and N400 in spite of there being no between-clause difference in the amplitudes for the effects.However,a conspicuous P600 was detected for ORCs,which indicated that Chinese EFL learners with low-proficiency have processing advantage for ACs and that L2 learners with different L2 proficiency adopt distinct processing strategies.Combining the research results of the two experiments,this thesis holds that Chinese EFL learners’ ORCs and ACs processing supports theories in the second language processing such as the Active Filler Strategy,and partly support the Shallow Structure Hypothesis,that is,low L2 proficiency learners have no access to predict the filler-gap structure in clauses and can only process shallow structures,while high L2 proficiency learners can adopt the Active Filler Strategy as native speakers to predict the gap position in ORCs,which brings the facilitation effect on their processing.This research has a theoretical contribution to a deeper understanding of the syntactic processing in the second language environment and is instructive for second language teaching.