Constructional Sources Of Implicit Agents In L2 Sentence Processing

AA verb can appear in different constructions to describe the same event. For example,the verb drive can appear in both the middle construction(The car drove quickly) and the passive construction(The car was driven quickly by someone). When the propositional phrase by someone is omitted, then both the passive construction and the middle construction, contain an implicit agent.The implicit agent in the middle construction is admittedly to be contributed by conceptual representations while what source contributes to the implicit agent in the passive construction remains a controversial issue. Among the first language studies investigating the source of implicit agents in the passive construction, some claimed that the implicit agent was contributed by the lexical representations, with the verb as a major contributor. However, other studies insisted that the implicit agent in the passive construction was derived from constructional representations, i.e., the cognitive system. With respect to the studies in the second language, few have been carried out to explore the source of implicit agents in the passive construction.Hence, the present study, through investigating proficient and less-proficient Chinese-English learners’ online processing of the passive construction, explores two research questions:(i) what source contributes to the interpretation of implicit agents when Chinese English learners process English passive construction?;(ii) does L2 proficiency affect the above sentence processing and how?Two self-paced reading experiments are conducted to resolve the above two research questions. And they are a 2(construction types: middle/passive) × 2(verb types: familiar verbs/novel verbs) ×2(proficiency level: low/high) × 2(training:yes/no) × 5(critical regions: the main clause, to, the adjective, the verb, the noun)factorial design.The experiments reveals two findings. First, apart from the main verb,Chinese-English learners also rely on the constructions to interpret the implicit agentsin the passive construction. Second, L2 proficiency does not influence the processing of implicit agents in the passive construction. Hence, the findings of the current study,on the one hand, have supplemented the constraint-based model and, on the other hand, posed some challenge to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis on L2 sentence processing.