A Study On The Effects Of Working Memory Capacity On The Inhibition In Senior High School Students’ Processing Of English Pronouns

In recent years,Inhibition mechanism,as a universal cognitive mechanism,has been a hot topic in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology.It plays an important role in constructing the mental representation of pronoun coherence in the process of pronoun in the first language processing.In addition,there is a significant positive correlation between working memory capacity and inhibition mechanism.Learners with high working memory capacity are more likely to activate their inhibition mechanism,thus promoting their language processing.The effects of working memory capacity on the inhibition mechanism and the role of inhibition mechanism in pronoun L2 processing have been confirmed by scholars at home and abroad.However,whether working memory capacity affects the inhibition mechanism of pronoun L2 processing has not been confirmed yet.In this study,60 senior high school students from a high school in Zhangzhou were tested online on pronoun processing by using the experimental paradigm of fixed pace reading.The inhibition mechanism of high and low working memory capacity on pronoun processing was investigated.The results showed that:1)High and low working memory capacity had significant influence on sentence comprehension ability,and the sentence comprehension ability of the group with high working memory capacity was significantly higher than that of the group with low working memory capacity.2)Working memory capacity significantly affect pronouns inhibition of L2 processing,high working memory capacity group of participants in the process of pronouns inhibition occurred earlier,and had a long duration,while the pronoun inhibition of low working memory capacity of the group of participants occurred relatively late,and had a short duration,the discovery of which is consistent with the results of Gernsbacher’s study(1989).3)In L2 processing of pronouns,the probing words(antecedent and non-antecedent)and the probing point significantly affected the inhibition mechanism of the L2 processing of pronouns.There was no significant difference between the working memory capacity and the antecedent reinforcement mechanism.This study has important guiding significance for English teaching in senior high school.In high school English teaching,first of all,teachers can effectively activate learners’ inhibition mechanism by improving their working memory capacity,so as to promote their language processing and improve the efficiency and accuracy of sentence comprehension.Secondly,teachers should strengthen the training of restraining pronouns in different sentence patterns to help students understand the referring meaning of pronouns,grasp the structural features of discourse,improve students’ ability to understand the meaning of discourse and enhance their comprehensive ability to use language,so as to achieve the purpose of communication and exchange.