A Comparative Study Of Advanced Chinese EFL Learners’ Affordance Derivation In Their Comprehension Of Chinese Discourse And English Discourse

AbstractWith the rapid development of embodiment philosophy and cognition, many theories and models of discourse comprehension that emphasize the origin of linguistic meaning have emerged in recent years, such as the Indexical Hpothesis(IH),Immersed Expriencer Frame(IEF). According IH, three processes are needed in discourse comprehension: indexing, deriving and meshing. As one of three sub-processes proposed by the Indexical Hypothesis, the psychological reality of affordance derivation has draw extensive attention. However, it is found that there are still few scholars having ever conducted empirical studies on affordance derivation by using the technique of E-prime or ERPs(Event-related Potentials) in current studies, and most of which focus on the comprehension of native language. Moreover, no one has made a specialized study on the difference in affordance derivation between bilinguals’ comprehension of native language and foreign language.To make up the mentioned weaknesses, the current research adopts an ERPs study, select Chinese EFL learners as subjects and includes both English discourse and Chinese discourse in the experiment. The following questions is to be addressed: Is there any efficiency difference in affordance derivation between advanced Chinese EFL Learners’ comprehension of Chinese discourse and English discourse?The whole study adopts a 2(discourse type: affordance-derivational discourse and affordance-nonderivational discourse) × 2(context type: English context and Chinese context) within-participant design. All of the thirty subjects including 11 males and 19 females are postgraduates majoring in English.The research including two experiments is completed in the Key Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience and Foreign Language Learning in SISU. In the research, half of subjects conduct the English experiment firstly and the other half complete the Chinese experiment firstly. After a week, they will conduct the other experiment. In each experiment, subjects are required to read and comprehend a discourse consisting of a paragraph and a critical sentence firstly, and then complete the lexical decision task, at last determine whether the meaning of an assertive sentence is consistent with the foregoing discourse. Both the RT and ERPs data are recorded when subjects process the lexical decision task. Besides, the experiment is programmed by E-prime1.1, and the ERPs results are collected, recorded and off-line analyzed by Neuroscan4.5. At last the results are analyzed by statistic software SPSS16.0.The results can be concluded as follows:(1)According to the behavioral data, in AD discourse, Chinese EFL learners spend less time on judging the probe words of Chinese context[MChinese/AD=824.41ms]than English context[MEnglish/AD=981.96ms], the difference between the RT is significant[tAD/Chinese&English= 2.43, p=0.030]. However, in ADN discourse, the difference is not significant even though subjects still spending less time on responding to probe words of Chinese context[M Chinese/ADN=961.9ms, MChinese/ADN=1123.3ms, tADN/Chinese&English= 1.67, p=0.118]. In this case, there is a difference in efficiency of affordance derivation between advanced Chinese EFL learners’ comprehension of Chinese discourse and English discourse, leading the native language(NL) superiority effect.(2) According to the ERPs data, under AD condition, the probe words of Chinese context[MAChinese=-0.467] elicits a bigger negative amplitude than that of English context [MAEnglish=0.252] over 230–550 ms, and the difference is not significant[tAD/Chinese&English=2.037, p=0.111]; However, under ADN condition, the difference is significant [tADN/Chinese& English=5.103, p=0.007] over 230-550 ms, and the mean amplitude is bigger when Chinese EFL learners process probe words of Chinese context[MAChinese=-0.961, MAEnglish=0.397], which still is consistent with behavioral results and displays the native language(NL) superiority effect.To sum up, both behavioral and ERPs data indicate there is efficiency difference in affordance derivation between advanced Chinese EFL learners’ comprehension of Chinese discourse and English discourse, for they still process Chinese discourse faster and better that English discourse.