The Influence Of Cognitive Inhibition On Chinese EFL Learners’Syntactic Movement

Syntactic movement, since its birth in Generative Transformational Grammar, has aroused a lot of controversy whether human beings really adopt this rule in spontaneously flowing out the language. Filler-gap dependency building thus has become one popular topic in proving the existence of the movement. With the involvement of psychology and neuroscience, more and more evidence indicates the reality of the dependency building in language comprehension and production. However, some researchers, after series of experiments, argue the dependency cannot be proved outside the alphabetic languages, especially in Chinese. The topicalized sentences in Chinese, despite looking transformed just as their English counterparts, are in fact base-generated. Consequently, it is worthwhile to discuss whether Chinese way of comprehension influences English filler-gap dependency building in learning English. Some researchers also investigate the efficiency of dependency building, and find working memory capacity has certain potential relationship with the reason why some people comprehend relative clauses better than others. Working memory, as is known to many scholars, correlates more or less with cognitive inhibition, and some researches even hold the working memory itself functions through inhibition. With these considered, it is decided to study how Chinese English learners build the filler-gap dependency in English comprehension from the angle of cognitive inhibition.The study tests52Grade2students in English translation major respectively on cognitive inhibition and cross-modal priming test. The result backs up the psychological reality of filler-gap dependency also in Chinese English learner, and the efficiency of dependency building is to a large extent related to cognitive inhibition capability, Furthermore, the thesis, after the overall consideration of the testing conditions, discovers the construction of dependency happens before the gap, verifying the finding of active trace strategy and parts of the view of syntactic prediction locality theory that the dependency building is no need to be waiting for reaching the in the gap. There’s also a side-finding in semantic integration of adjacent sentences that people with strong ability of inhibition behave better in integration efficiency than ones with low ability.