Brain Processing Of English Subject-Verb Agreement By Chinese Learners Of English At Different Levels Of Proficiency: An ERP Study

Compared with English, Chinese is short of rich grammatical morphology so that English s-v number agreement is nonexistent in Chinese. Given the lack of grammatical morphology in Chinese, s-v number agreement remains an obstacle for Chinese learners of English. Even Chinese learners of English with high levels of proficiency commit s-v violation errors.In this study, event-related potentials (ERPs) technique was used to investigate the neural processing of English subject-verb (s-v) number agreement by Chinese learners of English with high and low levels of proficiency. Thirty-six L2 learners (eighteen participants in each group) were presented with one hundred and twenty English experimental sentences involving s-v number agreement/disagreement. According to the number property of the head noun, local noun and the predicate, all test sentences were divided into four sentence types, sentence type A (singular-plural-singular), B (singular-plural-plural), C (plural-singular-plural) and D (plural-singular-singular). Participants were instructed to make grammatical judgment and their EEG data, accuracy and RT (response time) were recorded. After the whole experiment, EEG data were analyzed with the repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs).One of the experimental results indicated that the s-v violation error under the singular-plural condition was the easiest one to commit by both L2 low and advanced group, given the fact that the P600 effects elicited by the two plural-singular conditions were more robust than that evoked by the two singular-plural conditions. The results above proved the asymmetry that the plural is more " marked " than the singular. The other one of the experimental results reflected that L2 proficiency affected the processing of s-v number agreement because of higher grammaticality judgment accuracy and more sensitive neurocognition of the L2 advanced than that of the L2 low. With the comparison between sentence type C and D and between B and D, the P600 effects by the L2 advanced group were more robust and lasted longer than that by the L2 low group.