| L2morphosyntactic variability has been a notoriously persistent problem insecond language acquisition. Two accounts seek to provide explanations for theunderlying causes for this problem. The Representational Accounts argue that thisproblem arises because of lack of relevant syntactic representations in the L2learners’interlanguage grammar. While the Computational Accounts argue that L2interlanguage grammar is intact and the problem is attributable to external factorssuch as communicative pressure, L2working memory limitations etc. So far a lot ofstudies have been carried out to examine this issue. But their findings were far fromconclusive. And among the studies that targeted English subject-verb agreement, thereexisted limitations regarding their experimental design or statistics which reducedtheir power for testing the above-mentioned accounts.Built on previous research, the present study adopted an improved design andexamined the two accounts through English subject-verb agreement in a self-pacedreading task. It was found that:1. native English speakers were significantly sensitiveto English subject-verb agreement mismatches irrespective of distance between thesubject and its agreeing verb. By contrast, even advanced Chinese EFL learners (anaverage of13years of English learning; scoring above70in TEM-8), were insensitiveto such mismatches even when the subject and the verb were next to each other;2.Unlike native speakers, advanced Chinese EFL learners exhibited an odd pattern intheir reading times of the verbs: they responded slower to grammatical, inflectedverbs than their ungrammatical, un-inflected counterparts. This might be that the extra,semantically redundant inflectional morpheme was out of their expectations and putextra burden on their processing. These two aspects provided strong evidence thatChinese advanced EFL learners were insensitive to subject-verb agreementmismatches and were in support of the Representational Accounts.. |
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