An Eye-tracking Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Processing Of Verb Gapping In And-Coordinated English Sentence Comprehension

As it is linguistically interesting in human languages, elliptical constructions have aroused wide attention in linguistic research ever since Ross(1967) and numeral insightful works have been generated. However, although gapping is a well-studied type of ellipsis in theoretical linguistics, verb gapping has received only little attention in empirical studies on the processing of ellipsis from the native English speakers. In order to carry out an in-depth exploration of verb gapping, this paper tends to examine the psychological reality of comprehending verb gapping from proficient bilinguals, using eye-tracking technique to determine: Is there any eye tracking evidence to support the hypothesis that the processing of verb gapping is psychologically real for the Chinese EFL learners in and-coordinated English sentence comprehension?The present study is a one-factor within-subjects design with four levels(types of sentences: sentence with verb gapping, sentence without verb gapping). The apparatus is Eye Link 1000 from SR Research Company. The materials are presented on the computer screen randomly, and subjects are required to understand and response. Afterwards, all the eye-movement data should be put into the statistic software SPSS 16.0 for analysis. And all these eye-movement measures, such as first run dwell time, second run dwell time, regression-in count, regression-out count and regression-path duration are recorded as the dependent variables when twenty-eight participants read these experimental sentences. The experiment is completed in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience & Foreign Language Learning in SISU.The results of the current study demonstrate that:(1) In the AOI of Clause1, significant difference emerges on the regression-in count analysis [FNVGC-VGC(1, 27) =40.096, p=.000<.05] between the verb gapping condition and no verb gapping condition; However, no significant difference is observed on the second run dwell time [FNVGC-VGC(1, 27) =.286, p=.597 >.05].(2) In the AOI of Clause2, the verb gapping condition and no verb gapping condition show significant difference not only on the first run dwell time analysis[FNVGC-VGC(1, 27)=18.215, p=.000<.05], regression-out count analysis[FNVGC-VGC(1, 27)=154.537, p=.000<.05], but also regression path duration analysis[FNVGC-VGC(1, 27)=16.020, p=.000 <.05] between the verb gapping condition and no verb gapping condition. Besides, the first run dwell analysis in the AOI of Clause2 collapsing over participants shows that sentences with verb gapping(M=1258.1) are read longer than the no verb gapping condition(M=1052.9), even than the baseline condition(M=1231.7) in which the verb and the object noun phrase form an implausible meaning.(3) These eye movement measures, such as regression-out count, regression path duration, first run dwell time, showing significant difference, indicates that verbs’ absence influence EFL learners’ comprehension and processing of and-coordination; However, the second run dwell time shows no significant difference, which suggests that EFL learners are able to compensate the absent verbs in psychology. Therefore, it proves that the processing of verb gapping is psychologically real for EFL learners in and-coordinated English sentence comprehension.In a nutshell, the absent verbs have an impact on the processing of and-coordination, but it does not influence the semantic integration of the whole sentence, which proves that learners complement the absent words psychologically,namely, it is psychologically real for EFL learners to process the gapped verb in and-coordinated English sentence comprehension.