An Empiircal Study Of The Processing Of English Dative Construction By Chinese EFL Learners From The Perspective Of Coercion Theory

From the perspective of Coercion Theory, English dative construction can bedefined as the form-meaning pair with the form as Verb+Noun+preposition+Noun (VNpN) and the prototype meaning as “agent successfully causes recipient toreceive patient”. As far as my knowledge is concerned, the studies of English dativeconstruction mainly focus on its classification, acquisition, comparison betweenEnglish double noun construction and comparison between Chinese dativeconstruction. Relatively small quantities of studies are related to the English dativeconstruction processing.The current research adopts the empirical study by way of reaction time andaccuracy rate to explore the processing characters of different kinds of dativeconstruction by different processing styles of EFL learners. Two research questionsare put forward:1) What are the differences between verb-reliant EFL learners andconstruction-reliant EFL learners in processing zero coercion type of dativeconstruction (ZCTDC)?2) What are the differences between verb-reliant EFLlearners and construction-reliant EFL learners in processing construction coerciontype of dative construction (CCTDC)?The qualitative research is applied to the current study. Totally, one hundredstudents from first, second and third year of postgraduates majored in Englishlanguage and literature and first year underrates majored in business English inSichuan International Studies University (SISU) are chosen to conduct a test todistinguish and regroup them into different processing styles of EFL learners. Afterthis test,40qualified subjects—20verb-reliant subjects and20construction-reliantsubjects are obtained. The stimuli, programmed by E-Prime2.0, are presented atrandom on the19inch wide screen. The subjects are required to carry out thesensibility judgment by pressing the button upon understanding the sentence, afterwhich a corresponding question is presented to test whether they have a real understanding of the question. The behavioral data of reaction time and accuracy ratewere put into the statistic software SPSS. The experiment was completed in the KeyLab of Cognitive Neuroscience&Foreign Language Learning in SISU.The research obtains the following two findings:1) When processing ZCTDC,there is no statistically obvious difference between the verb-reliant EFL learners andthe construction-reliant EFL learners both in the reaction time (t=1.985, p=0.054) andaccuracy rate (t=0.29, p=0.977), that is to say，for the processing time and accuracyrate of dative construction, the verb-reliant EFL learners is similar to theconstruction-reliant EFL learners.2) When processing CCTDC, there is statisticallyobvious difference between the verb-reliant EFL learners and the construction-reliantEFL learners both in the reaction time (t=3.220, p=0.003) and accuracy rate (t=6.460,p=0.000); to speak it clearly, the processing time and the accuracy rate is longer andlower respectively than those of the construction-reliant EFL learners.To sum up, the ZCTDC processing difficulties of verb-reliant EFL learners isalmost the same as that of construction-reliant EFL learners, while the CCTDCprocessing difficulties of verb-reliant EFL learners is bigger than that ofconstruction-reliant EFL learners.To explain the reason of the above results, we try to employ the characters ofboth different processing styles of EFL learners and of different coercion types ofEnglish dative construction.