The Processing Mechanism Of English Past Tense By Chinese Learners Of English At Different Levels Of Proficiency:An ERP Study

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore how Chinese learners at different proficiency levels processed English regular and irregular past tense, whether proficiency affected the processing mechanism and whether Chinese learners at a high level of proficiency could process the English past tense in a native-like way.Participants in the present study were divided into two groups:20 were English majors who at least acquired the TEM-8 (Test for English Majors-8) certificate, and they were labeled as L2 learners with high proficiency (L2-high group); the other 21 were non-English majors who didn't pass CET-4 (College English Test-4), and they were labeled as L2 learners with low proficiency (L2-low group). A violation paradigm was adopted by substituting the infinitive verb form for past tense form in a simple past tense sentence. Every sentence had both correct and violated versions, but the participants saw only one version. Then they were required to judge whether the sentence was good or bad as soon and accurate as possible according to their instinctive reaction. The behavior and electrophysiological data were recorded by E-prime 2.0 and Brain Product softwares respectively. Then they were analyzed with SPSS 20.0 software package.As to the behavioral results, the L2-high group outperformed the L2-low group in both accuracy and reaction time. As to the ERP data, when processing regular past tense, the L2-high group demonstrated early anterior negativities distributed bilaterally over anterior sites followed by late positivities with an onset of 600 ms; when processing irregular past tense, only late positivities were shown in the L2-high group. The L2-low group, on the other hand, exhibited late positivities with an onset as early as 400 ms when processing regular past tense, and showed no reliable ERP effects when processing irregular past tense. In addition, although late positivities occurred in both groups in face of regular past tense violations, the latencies and scalp distributions were not the same.Regardless of proficiency level, Chinese learners of English showed distinguishable electrophysio logical reactions when processing regular and irregular past tense. However, the patterns they exhibited are different from each other. Compared to the L2-low group, the L2-high group demonstrated richer ERP effects, and tended to attain native-like processing concerning regular past tense.