The Second Language Acquisition Of Binding Principle And Chinese Reflexive

This study conducts five experiments to explore the cognitive understanding process of Chinese native speakers and foreign students to the coreferent of Chinese reflexive ziji without context. In experiment 1, we use sentence-gating task to examine the possibility of participants to make sure the referent of ziji by prosodic cue. We find that it is difficult for listeners to make sure the referent of ziji by prosodic cue. In experiment 2, we use cross-model priming and lexical naming task to see the cognitive understanding processing of Chinese native speakers to ziji when SOA=0ms. It is resulted that when target word is biased to the subject of clause, the priming effect of ziji to target item is greater than target word being biased to the subject of matrix, which represents local binding and is consistent with principle A of Binding Theory. But it conflicts with long distance binding phenomenon of Chinese reflexive ziji. In experiment 3, cross-model priming and lexical decision task is used to examine the cognitive understanding processing of Chinese native speakers to ziji when SOA=160ms. It is resulted that when target word is biased to the subject of matrix, the priming effect of ziji to target item is greater than target word being biased to the subject of clause, which represents long distance binding. In experiment 4, we use cross-model priming and lexical decision task to examine the cognitive understanding processing of Chinese native speakers to ziji when SOA=370ms. We find that in three kinds of priming forms, the target words that are biased to the subject of both matrix and clause are primed. It only represents semantic priming. This tells us that the syntactic analysis to the sentence has been finished and semantic integration has begun. In experiment 5, cross-model priming and lexical decision task is also used to examine the cognitive understanding processing of English native speakers and Korean and Japanese native speakers to ziji when SOA=0ms. It shows us that the understandings to Chinese reflexive ziji of participants with different mother languages are quite different. Korean and Japanese students represent long distance binding while English native speakers only represent semantic priming, but no syntactic priming effect. It tells us that English native speakers have not acquired Chinese reflexive and pronoun in syntactic category.