An ERP Study Of Regular And Irregular English Verbs Processing In Chinese Native Speakers

Currently, second language acquisition research has become a hot issue of AppliedLinguistics. The neural mechanism of second language is the focus of the neuralmechanisms of human language. The study of regular and irregular inflectional formsfacilitates further investigation of mental representation and processing of humanlanguages. Presently, researchers pay more and more attention to English regular andirregular forms. The number of studies related to this issue is still very small in China,most of which are behavioral studies.By means of ERPs technique, we examine English regular and irregular formsprocessing of Chinese-speaking English learners systematically. Two neurolinguisticexperiments in our study provide further electrophysiological evidence for the debate ofsingle-mechanism model and dual-mechanism model. And conclusions are as follows.Firstly, according to the behavioral and ERP data, we hold that the reaction time ofEnglish irregular verbs in experiment1and the reaction time of English regular verbs inexperiment2are respectively shorter than other verb types. We hold that methods ofprocessing regular and irregular past tense in the brain are different between thesentence and the word level.Secondly, at the sentence level, Chinese-speaking English learners tend tounderstand the whole sentence through the semantic information. While at the wordlevel, larger P600was elicited by irregular past tense compared to regular ones. Weconclude that different neural mechanisms are employed by regular and irregular verbs.Regular forms are stored in the brain by rules, and irregular ones are stored by memory.Our findings are consistent with the dual-mechanism model.Thirdly, by comparing the results of the two ERP experiments, we find that verbsat the word level elicited much more positive waves than those at the sentence level.There’s a clear distinction between those two levels.