The Effects Of Sentence Constraint And It's Mechanism

The effects of sentence constraint have been convinced in many English context researches. But its mechanism is controversial in recent researches. There are mainly two accounts: One is the featural restriction model (Schwanenflugel,et.al,2002); the other is the mutual inhibition hypothesis(Traxler&Foss,2000). Researcher designs 4 lexical decision experiments controlling stimulus onset asynchrony(SOA) in order to examine the two hypotheses of the mechanism of the effects of sentence constraint.Experiment 1 investigated the effects of sentence constraint in Chinese context. Experiment 2 investigated the effects of sentence constraint in the same condition as before in the high constraint sentences without SOA. Experiment 3 investigated the effects of sentence constraint with introducing a new variable-competitor which divided the expect words into the expect words with close competitor and the expect words with distant competitor. The last experiment compared the close competitor and the distant competitor directly to investigate the mechanism of the effects of sentence constraint.The result of the first experiment showed that there are significant effects of sentence constraint in Chinese context, too. The results of the second experiment can't validate its mechanism, but it trended to be the featural restriction model. The results of the third and the forth experiments are well consistent with that the mechanism of the effects of sentence constraint is the featural restriction model.