A Research On Transfer Mechanism Of Verb Features In Chinese English Learners

Language transfer is an important cognitive process in second language acquisition.Attention has focused more on the differences between the target language and themother tongue. Transfer mechanism in the syntactic processing of L2learners atdifferent proficiency levels has increasingly become a world-wide hotpot issue. AsChinese is different from Indo-European language，it is particularly fruitful to probe intotransfer mechanism of Chinese English learners.The event related potentials (ERPs) technology is used to investigate the transferof verb syntax from L1Chinese into L2English. English garden-path sentencesprocessing reveal that different proficiency Chinese English learners produce varianttransfer. These sentences include verb features that transitivity and subcategorizationbias are different from Chinese counterpart. The study brings us a preliminaryknowledge of transfer mechanism of Chinese English learners.The experimental results show inhibitory effect of N200between target languageand mother tongue. Chinese English learners have syntactic traces in the Englishsyntactic processing. Results are in line with Competition Model. Language transferhas an appreciable impact on Chinese-English learners’ syntactic processing. Theautomation of semantic and syntactic integration between different proficiency wasvariant. Transfer effect on the low proficiency group was stronger than the highproficiency group in the conflicting verb features condition. Namely, Proficiencyrestricts syntactic second-language processing of unbalanced bilinguals. The moredifferences of verb features, the more transfer effects. The prefrontal and righthemisphere has an important role in L2syntactic processing. For low skilled groups, thedifference was mostly in the left hemisphere, while the high proficiency group s of latebilinguals were reflected in the bilateral hemisphere, especially in the prefrontal.Language transfer has influences on L2syntactic ambiguity resolution which followsconstraint-based parallel models. There is any distinct processing mechanism betweenIndo-European native English learners and Chinese-English learners that is the absenceof P600effect.