The Neurocognitive Mechanism Of The Online Processing Of English Subject-verb Agreement By Chinese-speaking Learners Of English:an ERP Study

English subject–verb agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which seems to cause pervasive and profound difficulties in foreign language learning.Research of subject-verb agreement provides us a window into the cognitive mechanism underlying the computation of grammatical dependent relations.Importantly,this line of research has also shown that various experiment-related factors modulate the processing of English subject–verb agreement.Much work has demonstrated so-called number attraction effect in the comprehension and production of subject–verb agreement.However,one factor that has received much less attention is the determiner type of subjects.To address this gap,this thesis investigates the influence of number attraction and different determiners on Chinese L2 learners’ processing of English subject-verb agreement with omission errors.Two experiments were carried out to achieve this aim.As an initial step in specifying the role of number attraction and determiner type,Experiment 1 used a self-paced reading task to examine the processing of subject-verb agreement by Chinese English learners.Participants read sentences in which the subject-verb agreement differed according to Determiner Type(referential determiner vs quantificational determiner),Attractor Number(singular attractor vs plural attractor)and Grammaticality(grammatical vs ungrammatical).The results revealed the main effects of Determiner Type and Grammaticality,indicating that different determiners modulated the processing of English subject-verb agreement by Chinese English learners.Compared to Determiner Type,the effect of Attractor Number was relatively weak.Experiment 2 used event-related brain potentials to examine the effect of different determiners,excluding attractors,on the Chinese L2 learners’ online processing of subject-verb agreement with omission errors.The results indicated that a robust P600 effect was elicited in response to subject-verb agreement violations with omission errors.Furthermore,ERP processing patterns were affected by referentiality and number specification of determiners.Referentiality led to differences in scalp distribution of P600 and number specification gave rise to distinctive P600 latency and ERP components.The experiment reveals that 1)L2 learners are sensitive to subject-verb agreement violations with omission errors and P600 is elicited when the syntactic feature [+singular] of thematic verbs is used as a cue but fails to retrieve the number-matching subject in the working memory;2)L2 processing patterns of subject-verb agreement vary with different features of determiners.The findings not only provide new L2 ERP evidence to the checking theory and cue-based models of memory retrieval,but also have pedagogical implications for L2 subject-verb agreement acquisition and instruction.