An Empirical Study On The Psychological Reality Of Chomsky's Transformational-Generative Grammar

The thesis presents an empirical study on the psychological reality ofChomsky's Transformational and Generative theory.According to Chomsky, the deep structure of all grammatical sentences ofa language is generated according to a few rewriting rules, and the deepstructure thus generated is realized as speech sentences on the surface levelthrough the transformational rules. If this is true, then the more steps oftransformation are involved in a sentence, the longer the reaction time toprocess that sentence will be (Liu, 2000:188-189). This has aroused a lot ofexperimental research to testify the psychological reality of Chomsky'stransformational rules, and some of the results of their experiments confirmthe reality of Chomsky's transformational rules (for example, Savin &Perchonock, 1965), while some others challenged its reality (for example, X.Miao et. al. 1992).Among the research concerning psychological reality of Chomsky'stransformational and generative theory, few have done the said research withChinese materials, while most have done it with English materials. Theirresults show that some conform to Chomsky's theory, while some do not. Asatisfactory answer has not been found on the psychological reality ofChomsky's theory. Therefore, this research aims to testify if there does existpsychological reality in Chomsky's theory, especially if it is the same withChinese materials. The thesis here contributes a drive to the study of T-GGrammar, especially the study which adopts Chinese experiment materials inthe psycholinguistics study.This researcher has designed two experiments with two sets of Chinese and English sentences respectively. Both in the experiment with Englishmaterials and Chinese materials, an affirmative sentence or a picture with anaffirmative sentence is presented first on the screen, then different types ofsentences are shown on the screen of the computer one by one. Then thesubjects should decide whether these sentences have the same meaning withthe first picture or sentence that is presented on the screen. If it has the samemeaning with the first sentence or picture, the subjects should press "Y"button, and if not, the subjects should press "N" button, and their reaction timeis recorded by the computers automatically. The subjects whose nativelanguage is Chinese are 116 students from two classes of senior one inChengdu Experimental Foreign Languages School. The experiment withChinese materials is carried out in both classes, and the experiment withEnglish materials is completed in only one class as a subsidiary for furtheranalysis.According to the results of the experiments, the general tendency of thereaction time of the students to different sentences both in Chinese and Englishcomplies with Chomsky's Generative and Transformational theory. The morecomplex the sentence is, the more time it requires the students to react.However, when we come to the specific sentences, there is no correspondingrelationship between the reaction time and every transformational step.Therefore, whether there is a psychological reality for transformation is not yetclearly confirmed in this research. This research can ascertain that the responsetendency on the part of the students is roughly the same whether the testmaterials are in Chinese or in English, indicating that the students respond toEnglish sentences in the same way as they do to Chinese ones, probablybecause their English proficiency level is not praiseworthy.According to the results of the experiments, a suggestion concerning theteaching of a foreign language is given. The research is helpful in manyregards to future research. It provides us a way of deepening the philosophy oflanguage research since different sentence types are different ways ofunderstanding of and different approaches to the new world, and it boosts thedevelopment of the psycholinguistics concerning the research intopsychological reality to a certain degree.