| In the current study, we used event related brain potentials(ERPs) to explore how grammatical role, discourse information and different working memory capacity affect the resolution of referentially ambiguous pronouns in Chinese-English L2 speakers.Experiment 1 manipulated three conditions including sentence with subject pronoun or object pronoun, paralleled sentence structure or unparalleled sentence structure, high reading span or low reading span. The findings revealed that parallel grammatical role preferences were greater than subject-assignment strategy. But subject-assignment strategy also affected pronoun resolution. The reaction of paralleled sentence structure was faster than unparalleled sentence structure. High reading span group subjects prefer regard pronoun as subject than low reading span, and reaction time of high reading span was shorter than low reading span. We find two ERPs components: P200 and Nref. Subject pronoun and parallel sentence structure elicited Nref effect. Object pronoun elicited P200 effect.Experiment 2 manipulated four conditions including sentence with subject pronoun or object pronoun, paralleled sentence structure or unparalleled sentence structure, high reading span or low reading span, topic shift or no topic shift.The findings also revealed that parallel grammatical role preferences were greater than subject-assignment strategy. The reaction of subject pronoun was faster than object pronoun. We also found two ERPs: P200 and Nref. Unparalleled sentence structure elicited the P200 effect. From experiment 1 and 2, we found parallel grammatical role play more important role than subject-assignment strategy. Topic status effected pronoun resolution greatly and also parallel grammatical role was more important. Working memory capacity just play role in experiment 1,as mentioned before, reaction time of high reading span was shorter than low reading span. But in experiment 2, we didn’t find the effect. |
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