Study On Difficulty In Processing Relative Clauses Imposed By Subject/object Type And Antecedent Animacy

Since 1970s, the acquisition and processing of relative clause have attracted many researchers in psycholinguistics. According to the function of the head noun in relative clauses, researchers have proposed the concepts of subject relative clause and object relative clause and argued that the processing difficulty of these two types of clause is different because different cognitive resources are needed. Their researches on relative clauses mainly concentrate on the types of relative clauses and their matrix position. Based on different hypotheses and theoretical rationales, those researchers put forward different kinds of explanations, summed up in the following aspects: similarity-based interference, perspective-shifting, information flow account, etc. Besides, some researchers in psycholinguistics have suggested that difference in antecedent animacy also causes different degrees of processing difficulty. However, few empirical researches have combined subject/object relative clause type and antecedent animacy to study their synergy effects on Chinese EFL learners.Based on the previous researches, the present research selects random samples from the undergraduate and postgraduate non-English majors in Guangxi Normal University as research subjects. The experiment employs the computer software for large-scale collection of latency data developed in a provincial research project led by Prof. Zhang Shaolin, sets the subject/object relative clause type, antecedent animacy and the different English proficiency levels as three independent variables to examine their relationship with the two dependent variables of processing difficulties and lengths of response time used in processing, so as to explore the individual functions and coactive functions of the independent variables in causing comprehensive processing difficulties on the part of Chinese English learners. The relative clauses employed in this research are a reversion of sentences from Matthew J. Traxler, et al (2002). Most of the words are from vocabulary in College English Curriculum Requirements. SPSS 11.5 is used to describe and analyze the original data.The results of the experiment show that (1) Object relative clauses impose greater degree of difficulty than subject relative clauses in different kinds of antecedent animacy. (2) Higher level of English learners have lower degree of difficulty in processing most dimensions of relative clauses, but there is no significant difference in response time between two groups. (3) Animacy of antecedent partly predicts the degree of processing difficulty in processing relative clauses. The subject relative clause with an antecedent word belonging to the category of nouns based on sentient or living qualities are more difficult to process than that without those qualities. (4) Correlation analyses find that higher level English learners show more stable relationships among different dimensions involved in this research than lower level learners.This paper consists of six parts. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction, including the background and aim of the research and layout of the thesis. Chapter 2 is the literature review in which a concise description of some relevant and significant researches done by researchers home and abroad is made. Chapter 3 states the theoretical rationale on the present research. Chapter 4 depicts the experiment design, including the research method, aim of research, subjects, materials and the instruments for data collection. Chapter 5 focuses on the experimental results, the data analysis and discussion with the tables and graphs to explain the major findings. Chapter 6 includes a brief summary of the research, implication to pedagogy and the limitation of the research.