A Comparative Study Of Binding And Co-reference Between English And Chinese “Noun To Pronoun” In Chinese EFL Learners’ Sentence Comprehension

English grammar teaching occupies an important position in the history of China’s second language teaching. Pronoun, as the most commonly used part of speech, has been intensively studied by the linguists both at home and abroad. Due to the limitations of the experiment conditions, most achievements on this aspect, however, have mainly focused on grammatically judgment task, error analysis and so on. In other words, they largely depend on manifestation of the subjects’ to find out their mastery of grammar knowledge.The research of EFL learners’ pronoun learning can be under the guidance of Binding theory. However, there is a discrepancy in anaphoric resolution when the author manipulates the gender disagreement. It turns out to be that the discourse factor also influences the on-line sentence comprehension. From the psycholinguistic perspective, this thesis intends to do a further research under the basis of Cunnings et all.(2014). Consequently, Two experiments are conducted which examines the role of binding theory in on-line sentence comprehension via reaction time analysis. The thesis mainly deals with three questions: ⑴ what is the current situation of Chinese EFL learners’ pronoun resolution? ⑵ During the process of Chinese EFL learners’ pronoun interpretation in the E-prime experiment, what’s the priority of syntactic binding and discourse co-reference? And to what extent the gender disagreement between pronoun and its antecedent will affect the on-line sentence comprehension? ⑶Is there difference between EFL learners’ reaction to these two experiments? Can advanced Chinese EFL learners acquire the native-like strategy?The findings of the research are as follows: ⑴ The phenomenon of pronoun- misusing is very common, especially in a complex sentence which consists of several noun phrases(there is a disagreement between antecedent and its pronoun), the error rate is about 60﹪.⑵under the circumstances of the two conditions(Full Agreement& QP—Pron Disagreement), the subjects intend to choose discourse-based antecedent. Nevertheless, under the circumstances of the other two conditions(Full Disagreement& NP—Pron Disagreement), the subjects have preferences to choose the syntax-based antecedent. When there is a full disagreement between the antecedent and pronoun, it proved to be more difficult in pronoun resolution. Furthermore, according to the repeated measures of One-way ANOVA, there is significant difference between the four passage types(p<.05). ⑶Lastly, the author makes a comparison between the two experiments and finds that although the average reaction time of the Chinese corpus is relatively shorter, the research results is the same with the experiment1,which indicate that the advanced EFL learners have adopted the similar strategy in the anaphoric resolution.