An ERP Study On English Idioms Processing:Effects Of Second Language Proficiency And Semantic Compositionality On Chinese EFL Learners

English idioms as an indispensable part of English language system,are prevalent and popular among English native speakers.They frequently and effortlessly use idioms in their daily lives.For EFL students,having a good command of English idioms may be a symbol of acquiring authentic language and is of great significance.Therefore,it is important to investigate on the factors that influence comprehension and processing of English idioms.Up to date,most of the studies have centered on the effects of familiarity,transparency and context on the English idiom comprehension of native speakers.Only a small number of studies have begun to focus on such factors as semantic compositionality and second language proficiency of EFL students.In addition,there is some controversy over the effect of semantic compositionality.Therefore,this thesis tries to explore the effects of second language proficiency and semantic compositionality on English idiom processing and if there is an interaction effect between the two factors.The present study took advantage of the event-related potentials(ERPs)to make an investigation of the effects of second language proficiency and compositionality as well as an interaction effect thereof.Participants of this study came from Shandong University of Finance and Economics.They were divided into two groups according to their second language proficiency(English proficiency).The group with high second language proficiency was made of 7 postgraduates of English majors and the low second language proficiency group consisted of 8 sophomores of non-English majors.Primed by literal Chinese interpretations of constituent parts,English idioms with different degrees of compositionality were visually presented to two groups of participants for performing semantic judgment tasks.To be specific,participants were required to read all the presented Chinese phrases on the screen of computer silently and then try to understand the target English idioms or phrases following them.Every participant is supposed to make an judgment as quickly and as accurately as possible on whether the target idiom was semantically relevant to the meaning of the preceding priming Chinese phrases by means of pressing corresponding keys on the computerkey board.All prime-target pairs were presented in a pseudo-randomized order to make sure that trials belonging to the same type did not appear consecutively.Both the behavioral data(the reaction time in particular)and the ERP data(the N400 in particular)were recorded and analyzed.The present study adopted 2×3 mixed design and took advantage of Independent Samples T Test and two-factor repeated measures ANOVA to analyze the data of the experiment.Major findings were briefly listed as follows:First,second language proficiency affects English idiom processing on Chinese EFL learners.Participants with high second language proficiency behave faster and better when they processed English idioms by means of semantic judgment than those with low second language proficiency.In addition,the electrophysiological data demonstrate the effect of second language proficiency on lexical access and semantic integration.The higher the second language proficiency level is,the earlier an N400 crest occurs,which means the faster the learners completed the process of semantic integration.Second,the dimension of compositionality has been illustrated to exert an influence on English idiom comprehension by Chinese EFL learners through a detailed discussion on the basis of statistical analyses of behavioral and ERP data.This finding is in favor of the compositional hypothesis which assumes that literal meaning of their constituents,as the background of concept comparison with the overall figurative meaning of idioms,is still cognitively active and accessible in idiom processing.It is also partly in favor of the Constraint Based Model.It suggests that multiple linguistic factors jointly constrain figurative meaning retrieval in a time-dependent fashion.People use distinct types of information simultaneously during idiom processing,taking advantage of a number of factors that influence both direct retrieval and compositional analysis of idioms.Furthermore,the two factors(second language proficiency and semantic compositionality)have an interaction effect on English idiom processing by Chinese EFL learners.According to the results of the experiment,this means that the reactiontime for processing idioms with high compositionality was not significantly different for both types of participants.But when they processed idioms with medium and low compositionality,the reaction time was significantly different.The present study confirms the psychological reality of compositionality and provides empirical evidence for the Idiom Compositional Hypothesis.English idioms do not form a unique and special class of linguistic items and can share many of the same compositional properties normally associated with more “literal” language.The prsent study offers some pedagogical implications to idiom teaching and learning.In the process of English idiom teaching,teachers can give some intentional guidance to students and lead them to do some compositional analysis when students process idioms.Great importance should be attached to improvement of second language proficiency and metaphorical competence of students.The limitation of the present study is that the number of participants is small,which may make the results less persuasive.So the further study can involve some more participants into the experiment.