Competition Of Sentence Processing Cues For Chinese Learners Of English

This study, based on the Competition Model (Bates & MacWhinney, 1982,1987, 1989), investigates the competition of sentence processing cues when Chinese learners of English (beginning, intermediate and advanced learners) try to interpret strings of two nouns plus a verb in Chinese and English. Two sentence processing cues are to be manipulated, i.e., word order and animacy1. This is an attempt to describe how Chinese learners of English interpret sentences of Chinese and English when word order and animacy compete with each other, and try to find if there is a universal prepotency for semantics2 in sentence processing. Seven groups of subjects participated in the experiment, one as Chinese controls, two as beginning learners of English, two as intermediate learners and the rest two as advanced learners. Subjects were asked to select the subject/agent of 9 online sentence patterns. In addition, three different sentences were constructed for each sentence pattern; thereby producing a total of 27 sentences and each sentence in the experiment was composed of two nouns and one transitive verb. The tested sentences were in two versions: Chinese and English. The Chinese controls were tested on Chinese sentences only; one group of learners was tested on Chinese sentences, and the other group of learners of the same English proficiency level was tested on English. Both choice scoring3 and reaction time (RT) were collected through E-Prime and entered into the analysis of variance (ANOVA).The findings of the study are as follows:Finding 1. In the interpretation of Chinese sentences, animacy (LI cue) overwhelmingly dominated for all the groups of subjects, but the cue of word order (L2 cue) also exerted its influence on learners of English, and the influence tended to gradually increase along with English proficiency improvement (advanced learners excepted). Finding 2. In the interpretation of English sentences, the semantic cue also dominated for all the groups of English learners. However, along with English proficiency improvement, the influence of word order tended to increase gradually, and there was a tendency for the influence of noun animacy to decrease gradually (advanced learners excepted). Finding 3. As for both Chinese and English sentences with AA combination, where animacy was constant, it was the semantic cue that was mainly relied on.Finding 4. As the semantic cue dominated in both Chinese and English sentence interpretation, there existed a semantic cue prepotency in L2 learners' sentence processing.Such findings indicated that in both English and Chinese sentence processing, animacy and word order were both important cues for all the different levels of learners, but animacy was generally stronger than word order. However, with the development of the L2, word order tended to produce stronger effect on sentence interpretation. The one exception to that tendency is the performance of the advanced learners who were less influenced by word order than the intermediate learners. When animacy was held constant, relative animacy - a semantic cue more universal than animacy, exerted greater effect than word order.