Syntactic Or Semantic Information Advanced:an Investigation Into The Mechanism Of Pre-intermediate Chinese EFL Learners In Sentence Processing

Second language sentence understanding is one of the core questions in language understanding.Theoretical accounts of how second language learners process the target language sentence vary in the answers to the question: How does the L2 learner adopt syntax and semantic information to understand sentences.Syntax-first model(Frazier,1987)posits that sentence processing is structural-based and L2 learners rely on syntactic information in sentence comprehension.On the contrary,shallow structure hypothesis proposes that for L2learners' incomplete and divergent grammar knowledge,the syntactic representation they constructed in sentence processing is shallower.So their sentence processing is semantic-based.However,the results in previous studies comes from the participants' L2proficiency(intermediate and high-proficient),participants' L1 background(Indo-European)and materials(ambiguity or dependencies sentences),which cannot be extended to all proficiency L2 learners.The question of how language beginner understand sentences still remains inconclusive.What's more,it is unclear whether there is an interaction effect between the sentence processing mechanism and language proficiency in Chinese-English learner.The present study takes 42 senior high school students and 22 graduate students as participants with a “pausing paradigm” to explore a)What's pre-intermediate Chinese EFL learner's sentence processing mechanism,syntax or semantic advanced? b)Is there a dynamic change in the pre-intermediate Chinese EFL learners processing mechanism as language proficiency increased?The result is that the beginners(senior high school students),spent less time in the non-juncture pausing sentence than juncture pausing sentence(P<0.01),indicating that they adopt a semantic-based processing in sentence processing.This supports the shallow structure hypothesis which holds that learners' understanding of sentence employ most sentence semantic information.Differently,intermediate level participants(graduate students)reacted much faster with juncture pausing sentences than with the non-juncture pausing sentences(P<0.01),suggesting a structural-driven processing.This is consistent with the syntax-first model which proposes that L2 learners apply syntactic computation most into the sentence processing.When the data from the two groups were put together and done with Two-wayrepeated ANOVA,language proficiency showed an interaction effect.This statistical result implies that,with the development of language proficiency,L2 learners change their sentence processing mechanism from semantic-based to syntactic-based,i.e.,the mechanism of auditory sentence processing is dynamic for the Chinese EFL beginners.A few potential implications for the English teaching in China were mentioned then based on the study.