English Gender Agreement Processing Among Chinese EFL Learners: An ERP Study

Research on second language acquisition has been one of the fruitful fields inlanguage studies. One of the questions that L2researchers keep asking is whether L2learners, especially late L2learners, can attain native-like performance. To address thisquestion, not only theoretical frameworks are formulated, but also abundant empiricalstudies are done. With the help of the event-related potential (ERP) technique, a largeamount of empirical research examines the neural performance of L2in comparison tothat of L1. Among these L2ERP studies, neural differences between L1and L2processing are found, especially when syntactic or morphosyntactic processing isexamined, indicating L2processing is different from L1processing.Also as an effort to examine L2processing, the present ERP study investigatesChinese EFL learners' processing of English antecedent-reflexive gender agreement,which is under-explored in L2ERP literature. In the four ERP experiments conductedin the present study, a correctness judgment task was employed to monitor explicitlinguistic knowledge of antecedent-reflexive gender agreement and two most-oftenreported ERP components, namely N400and P600, were taken as indicators of theneural processing.In Experiment One, no robust P600effect was observed in response to genderviolated sentences among Chinese EFL learners, which is in contrast to the pronouncedP600effect reported among native English (Osterhout, Bersick,&McLaughlin,1997).In addition to the non-native-like neural processing of gender agreement, participantsshowed large variation in detecting gender violation. This behavioral variation isseldom reported in previous ERP studies among non-novice L2learners. In order tofurther examine Chinese EFL learners' processing of gender agreement, three moreexperiments were run.In Experiment Two, a short training was given and participants' behavioralaccuracy rate greatly improved. However, like Experiment One, no robust P600effectwas found. These results suggest that a short training can quickly but only boost learners' behavioral performance.Experiment Three replicated Experiment One and the data of all the participantswere pooled together. The goal of the replication is to conduct valid ERP analysesseparately for those whose behavioral accuracy rate was high and for those whoseaccuracy rate was low. Even though all the participants were similar in Englishlanguage history and language proficiency, the robust P600effect was only observedamong those who successfully detected gender violation. For those who could notdetect gender violation for most of the time, no N400or P600effect was found. For theobserved individual difference, there seems to be two possible interpretations. It couldbe interpreted as the evidence of individual differences in L2acquisition or it could bethe result of the participants' differential sensitivity to gender information. If the secondinterpretation is correct, individual difference will be found in L1(Chinese) antecedent-reflexive gender agreement as well.In order to find out which interpretation is more reasonable, Experiment Fourinvestigated Chinese antecedent-reflexive gender agreement. Since Chinese speakersdid not display individual difference in response to gender violation in Chinese, thesecond interpretation for the results of Experiment Three is disproved.To summarize, when processing English antecedent-reflexive gender agreement,only some Chinese EFL learners seemed to achieve native-like performance on bothbehavioral and neural levels. These findings indicate that there is an individualdifference in L2acquisition, which is seldom reported in L2ERP studies among non-novice learners. Because all the participants are similar in L2language history andlanguage proficiency, the reason why some learners are quicker in acquiring an L2feature than others needs to be investigated in the future studies.