The Time Course Of Lexical And Structural Processes In L2 Cleft Sentence Comprehension

In native language(L1)online sentence processing,object-extracted relative clauses(RCs)and cleft sentences have shown to involve greater processing difficulty around the verb(the cleft region in cleft sentences)than their subject-extracted counterparts.The processing difficulty reflects a purely syntactic difference.However,this processing asymmetry can be modulated by lexical and semantic information of the noun phrases(NPs)and the verbs in the sentences.Second language(L2)online processing showed that L2 learners' sensitivity to lexical,semantic and structural information is different from native speakers'.Studies on cleft sentence processing in native speakers and high proficient L2 learners showed that structural processing may be delayed due to high costs in lexical processing,as indicated by evidence that structural building was delayed to two words after the verb(the post-cleft region in cleft sentences)for sentences with low-frequency verbs.However,L2 cleft sentence processing only examine the performance of high proficient L2 learners from German.How L2 proficiency affects Chinese EFL learners' lexical and structural processes during online cleft sentence comprehension remains unclear.Therefore,this study,through manipulating verb frequency and sentence type,investigates the time course of lexical and structural processes during online sentence comprehension by Chinese EFL learners of different proficient levels.Two research questions are raised: 1)At what time do verb frequency and syntactic structure take effect during online comprehension of English cleft sentences by Chinese EFL learners? 2)How does Chinese EFL learners' L2 proficiency influence the online processing of English cleft sentences?An online self-paced reading experiment was conducted to resolve the above two research questions.And it is a 2(verb frequency: high-frequency and low-frequency)×2(sentence type: subject-extracted and object-extracted cleft sentences)×2(L2 proficiency: low proficiency and high proficiency)factorial design.The findings suggest that for low proficient L2 learners,only verb frequency exerted significant effect.For high proficient L2 learners,both verb frequency and sentence type demonstrated significant main effects and they interacted with each other.The interactions of verb frequency and sentence type on sentence processing for high proficient L2 learners are similar to those for native speakers.The present study proved that L2 proficiency affects L2 learners' processing of English cleft sentences.Thus the study challenges the Shallow Structure Hypothesis.On the other hand,the interaction of verb frequency and sentence type indicate that lexical retrieval precedes structural building,which supports models that contend ordered and sequential processing of lexical and structural information.Theories of lexical and syntactic representation and usage-based approach are used to explain the frequency effects observed in the present study.