China's Second Language English Verb Past Tense Process Of Psychological Mechanisms

According to three different experiments, this paper researches the processingmechanism of English past tense by different proficiency participants. All theparticipants are undergraduate students, including high proficiency participants andlow proficiency participants. The first experiment uses paradigm of word prime word,and there are three critical types of prime-target pairs: identity, test and unrelated.The core materials are sixty pairs of regular verbs with high frequency and sixty pairsof low frequency. The participants were asked to judge whether the target word istrue. The second experiment uses paradigm of word by word, and the critical itemscontain regular or irregular verbs with high frequency or low frequency each hasthirty verbs. The participants were asked to judge whether the sentence is correct.The third experiment uses paradigm of word prime sentence. There are threeconditions which are the same with the first experiment. The critical items are ninetysentences of high frequency regular verbs and low frequency irregular verbs each,thirty sentences of each condition.The results of experiment1are as follows: proficiency and frequency havesignificant effect. For the ACC data, high and low proficiency participants show nopriming, and for the RT data, they show partial priming, which are different with afull priming effect of L1. The results of experiment2are as follows: proficiency havesignificant effect. All the participants show a significant effect of frequency on bothregular and irregular past tense, which is different with L1show a significant effect offrequency only on irregular past tense. The results of experiment3are as follows:proficiency have significant effect. But its results do not comply with full primingeffect, partial priming and no priming. This indicates that in the relative real contextenvironment also needs further study.The results show that: English past tense is significant influenced by proficiency.The Chinese L2show the frequency effect on regular past tense. In addition, thepriming effect is different between Chinese L2and L1. These show that Chinese L2process regular and irregular past tense verbs by the word storage, which is called the declarative memory processing.