An ERP Contrastive Study Of Korean-Chinese And Han-Chinese College Students' Processing Of English Passive Sentences

There are two routes in sentence processing which include syntactic processing and semantic processing.This paper mainly studies the syntactic construction and semantic representation of passive voice,which are different among Chinese,Korean and English.In Chinese passive voice,the predicate verb doesn't have morphological change.However,in Korean and English passive voices,unmarked passive sentence shows a low frequency,but Chinese passive sentences show a high frequency.We also can know that Korean passive voice is affected by emotional coloring of verbs.Meanwhile some researches show that different levels of language proficiency have a strong effect on syntax processing in second language acquisition.Therefore,21 students are selected as the subjects of study.We adopt ERP technique with the experimental design of 2(Han-Chinese learners,Korean-Chinese students,)*2(moderately proficient,highly proficient)*4(no anomaly sentence,syntactically anomaly,semantically anomaly,double anomaly)to probe into the cognitive neural mechanism of the processing of passive voice by English learners of different native background.The aim of the study is to answer the questions:1.the characteristic of Han-Chinese and Korean-Chinese students' processing of English simple passive sentence.2.The influence of different proficiency of Han-Chinese and Korean-Chinese students' processing of English simple passive sentence.3.How native language syntactic structure affects the English simple passive sentence processing.4.The analysis of Han-Chinese and Korean-Chinese students'cognitive neural mechanism in the processing of English simple passive sentences.The results show:1.The differences of accuracy and reaction time in English passive sentence processing among Korean-Chinese moderately proficient students,Korean-Chinese highly proficient students,Han-Chinese moderately proficient students,and Chinese highly proficient students are not remarkable.2.The four groups all have remarkable differences in the processing of double anomaly English simple passive sentences.Korean-Chinese moderately proficient students and Han-Chinese moderately proficient students' accuracy scores are lower than Chinese highly proficiency students.3.The four groups all have remarkable differences in the processing of semantic anomaly English simple passive sentences.Korean-Chinese moderately proficient students' accuracy scores are lower than Han-Chinese highly proficient students.Chinese moderately proficient students'accuracy scores are lower than Chinese highly proficient students.The English proficiency is significant in English simple passive syntactic anomaly sentences processing4.Korean-Chinese highly proficient students'accuracy scores are lower than Chinese highly proficient students in the processing of syntactic anomaly English simple passive sentences.Chinese moderately proficiency students' accuracy scores less than Chinese highly proficiency students in English simple passive syntax anomaly sentences processing5.For the P200 in semantic anomaly,Chinese moderately proficient students make a bigger wave form at the nearly left than both two types of Korean-Chinese students.For the P600 in semantic anomaly,Chinese moderately proficient students make a bigger wave form at the middle-right than those other three groups.For the P600 in Syntactic anomaly and double anomaly,Korean-Chinese highly proficient students make a bigger wave form than Chinese moderately proficient students.For the N400 in semantic anomaly,Korean-Chinese moderately proficient students make a bigger wave form at the right brain area than Chinese moderately proficient students and Korean-Chinese highly proficient students.Chinese highly proficiency students make a bigger wave form than Chinese medium proficient students.For the N400 in syntax anomaly and double anomaly,Korean-Chinese moderately proficiency students and Chinese highly proficient students make a bigger wave form at the left brain area than Chinese moderately proficiency students.In conclusion,the paper explains the English passive double anomaly sentence processing not only effected by Chinese and Korean mother tongue transfer,but also influenced by English proficiency.For the highly proficient group,the students whose mother language is Korean make a bigger influence on English passive simple syntactic anomaly sentence processing.The English proficiency is an important factor for Chinese native language in English semantic and Syntactic anomaly sentence processing.The result of the ERP verifies the conclusion of behavior data,we can see the native language and proficiency all show different ERP elements:N400 and P600 relates to Syntactic anomaly.P200,N400,P600 relates to semantic anomaly.Double anomaly relates to N400 and P600.So we can see,the English passive simple sentence processing affects not only mother language,but also proficiency.P600 and N400 are the important elements for ERP.