An ERP Study On The Acquisition Of English Articles By Chinese Language Learners Of English

Using ERP(Event-related potentials)technique,the present study attempts to probe into the difference of neural mechanisms between native English speakers and Chinese advanced learners of English while processing English articles.Comparing with English,Chinese is a language without articles.Thus,Chinese learners of English must learn how to use English article system totally anew and therefore have great difficulty in acquiring it.Many previous behavioral studies showed that in spite of relatively high proficiency Chinese learners of English would still make errors in using articles.Previous studies about English articles mostly focused on the aspect of language production and little was known about the online processing of English articles by Chinese learners of English.The present study employed ERP technique to investigate the neural mechanisms of both native English speakers and Chinese learners of English.Thirty-six participants(eighteen participants in each group)were demonstrated with one hundred and twenty experimental sentences containing articles with its correct or incorrect usage.According to different types of English articles,with the standards of a)the article being definite or not and b)the correct or incorrect use of the article,experimental sentences were divided into four types:correct(Type A)and violation conditions(Type B)in[+definite,+specific]group,correct(Type C)and violation conditions(Type D)in[-definite,+specific]group.Participants were required to make grammatical judgments quickly and accurately.Meanwhile,both behavioral data and ERP data were collected.After the experiment,the data collected were analyzed with SPSS 20.0 software package.Behavioral results of the experiment revealed that Chinese English learners outperformed native English speakers in A and B conditions in terms of both accuracy and response time,while performed almost equally well as English native speakers in C and D conditions in terms of accuracy but responded less quickly than English native speakers.ERP data showed that a P600 effect was elicited by English native speakers in the violation of both A and C.conditions with the amplitude of P600 elicited in the violation of A condition smaller than that of P600 in the violation of C conditions.By contrast,a N400 effect was elicited in the violation sentence of A condition by Chinese learners of English while a biphasic N400 followed by a P600 effect was elicited in the violation sentences of C condition.The experimental results demonstrated.that it was more difficult for Chinese learners of English to process English articles than English native speakers.Nevertheless,it is not impossible for Chinese advanced learners of English to acquire English articles.