English Relative Clause Processing By Chinese EFL Leaners With High And Low Proficiency:An ERP Study

Previous studies which mainly focused on the Indo-European language family supported that SRs were easier to be processed than ORs. However, studies conducted to investigate Chinese suggested that the processing of ORs was easier than that of SRs. Besides, increasing studies indicated that the processing of relative clauses not only consisted of the processing of syntactic grammar, the semantic factors such as animacy of the embedded nouns also had a significant influence on the processing of relative clauses. Relative clauses whose subject was animate and object was inanimate were easier to be processed. Based on these achievements, the present study aimed to solve these three questions: (1) What's the difference between L2 learners and native speakers in the processing of the relative clause? (2) What effect would the proficiency of L2 learners make on the relative clause processing? (3) What effect would the animacy of embedded nouns make on the relative clause processing?To solve those questions, this study adopted Event-related potentials to record participants' neurological data, and analyzed the data with the use of SPSS.Participants in the present study were divided into two groups: 20 were labeled as L2-high group; the other 20 were labeled as L2-low group. As to the behavioral results, the L2-high group outperformed L2-low group in reaction time in the processing of SRs, while no obvious difference was found in accuracy of comprehension in the two groups. Besides, the reaction time was longer when participants processed the relative clauses in which the subject was inanimate and the object was animate than that of the relative clauses whose subject was animate and object was inanimate. As to the ERP data, the L2-high group elicited obvious N400 effect in 300-400ms time window in the processing of ORs, and in the same time window, there was also an obvious N400 effect caused by the semantic violation when the subject of relative clause was inanimate. In addition, in SRs, the N400 evoked by semantic violation was more significant, and the N400 elicited by syntactic processing was more significant when there was no semantic violation. Nevertheless,no reliable ERP components were found in 550-750ms time window. In contrast to the L2-high group, no typical ERP components were found in the L2-low group in the four experimental conditions.These results showed that similar to native speakers of English, the L2-high group was also sensitive to the syntactic difference between SRs and ORs without the negative transfer of Chinese, while the L2-low group could not distinguish the syntactic difference caused by SRs and ORs in the same way as native speakers. In addition, the results also showed that the relative clauses whose subject was animate was easier to be processed than those whose subject was inanimate, which also proved that the processing of syntax and semantics was parallel and interacting with each other instead of being simply syntax first or semantic-first.