Effect Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Working Memory Span On Their Sentence Ambiguity Processing-an Eye Movement Experiment

The main goal of sentence processing is to analyze human beings’ mentalmechanism. Many studies had been done on native speakers’ ambiguous sentenceprocessing and found their processing of ambiguous sentences would be influenced bysuch factors as lexical information, syntactic structure, contextual information, prosodyand their working memory span. However, few research focused on foreign languagelearners’ ambiguous sentence processing. The present study mainly focus on ChineseEFL learners’ processing of English relative clauses with attachment ambiguity and toexplore whether working memory span would influence their cognitive processing.143non-English major sophomores took part in the working memory span test，and36students of them would be chose for an on-line eye movement experiment, other107students participated in an off-line questionnaire investigation. Those36studentswould be divided into two groups (the High Group and the Low Group) according totheir score of reading span test, and each group consists of18subjects. Their firstfixation duration, total fixation duration, regressive duration, regressive counts and firstregression region would be recorded as experimental data in the eye movementexperiment. The main purpose of the questionnaire investigation is to know readers’attachment preference when processing English relative clauses with attachmentambiguity. SPSS Statistics17.0software was used for the quantitative analysis ofexperimental data and a case analysis was used for the subjects’ fixation counts inreading.The results show that1) Subjects’ English proficiency and working memory spanmay influence their cognitive processing on English relative clauses with attachmentambiguity.2) Chinese EFL learners have the different attachment preference comparewith native speakers when processing English relative clauses with attachmentambiguity.3) Few Chinese EFL learners can use lexical information to analyzesentences when processing English relative clauses with attachment ambiguity.According to the results, we get three conclusions.1) Chinese EFL learners’ sentence processing mechanisms are different from native speakers’.2) Influenced bythe difference of their working memory span and foreign language proficiency, secondlanguage learners’ sentence processing in the High Group are different from that in theLow Group.3) The results in the on-line eye movement experiment are different fromthat of the off-line questionnaire investigation, implies foreign language learners mayuse different processing mechanism in their initial sensory processing and lattercomprehension processing.