Assign Thematic Roles. Sentence Comprehension Study Of The Psychological Mechanism

Sentence comprehension is a process in which reader has syntactic and semantic parsing while retrieving meaning of word based on words recognition, and forms whole meaning of sentence. In sentence comprehension, there is a thematic roles assignment process that refers to an on-line process that assigns a thematic role to a local noun phrase. This paper explored mental mechanism of thematic roles assignment of adolescent in special context during sentence processing, as well as the influence of working memory.Two experiments were conducted. We investigated three participant groups, they are middle school students, high school students and college students. Their working memory span was classified into high and low groups.Experiment design was 2(context: antecedent, no antecedent)×2(verb: selecting, no-selecting) × 2(working memory span: high, low)×3(grade: middle school students, high school students, college students).Experiment 1 used self-pace stop-making sense judgment task, and dependent variables were right judgment percent and reaction time on verb position. Experiment 2 used Eyelink II eye tracker to explore further goal of the research, and dependent variables included fixation duration, first fixation duration, first pass time, regression count and total fixation time.The results are the followings:(1) Middle school students, high school students and college students could use verb information and assign thematic roles at verb when they met verb.(2) In stop-making sense judgment task, context information produced on-line influence at verb. But in natural reading condition, context information occurred on-line influence at verb for middle school students, and influence of context information occurred at the end of sentence for high school students and college students.(3)In special context, verbal lexical information was activated immediately and used to assign thematic role of the word in object position to prior antecedent whatever filled this role when verb was recognized.(4) Both high and low working memory span could assign thematic roles on-line,...