The Effect Of Entrenchment On L2 Syntactic Processing

In this study,Event-related potentials technique was applied to explore how Chinese English learners processed high,medium and low frequency verb constructions which connect the infinitive with to or the—ing form as objects.This work also dealt with the degrees of entrenchment and the processing difference of these verb constructions of three different frequency in the minds of Chinese English learners at distinct proficiency levels and attempted to investigate an answer to the question "How should we understand the influence of entrenchment on the syntactic processing of second language?".Previously,researches of language entrenchment mainly focus on native speakers but ignore the second language learners.There are even fewer on Chinese English learners.Therefore,this thesis is designed to make a deep empirical exploration into language entrenchment of Chinese English learners from the perspective of entrenchment.There were two groups of participants in this study(40 participants in total and 20 participants for each group)which contained L2(second language)learners with high proficiency(L2-high group)who at least acquired the certificate of TEM-8(Test for English Majors-8)and L2 learners with low proficiency(L2-low group)who only passed CET-4(College English Test-4)but not CET-6(College English Test-6).The experimental stimuli were selected from Chinese English learner corpus,in which high,medium and low frequency verb constructions which connect the infinitive with to or the-ing form as objects would be selected.One hundred and eighty simple English experimental sentences with different frequency of verb constructions and fillers(90 sentences for each)were presented to the participants on the computer screen segmentation by segmentation.After the experimental sentences,the judgement task would be presented and the participants were required to judge whether the sentences of judgement task were right or wrong as soon and accurate as possible.The EEG(electroencephalogram)data,accuracy and RT(reaction time)of judgement task were recorded and the EEG data were analyzed with the repeated measures analyses of variance(ANOVAs)after the whole experiment.With regard to the behavioral data,the L2-high group outperformed the L2-low group in both accuracy and reaction time.According to the ERP data,when processing high,medium and low frequency verb constructions which connect the infinitive with to or the-ing form as objects,the L2-high group showed sustained early anterior negativity and anterior negativity which also demonstrated that the entrenchment degree of verb constructions of L2-high group was higher and processing time was less than those of L2-low group.In addition,during the processing,the L2-low group demonstrated sustained early anterior negativity,N400 and P600 effects,and the P600 effects elicited in processing sentences of low frequency verb constructions were more robust than the other two conditions,which showed L2-low group spent more efforts and time processing not entrenched verb constructions.The results of experiment had also proved that the proficiency levels of L2 learners and frequency of second language constructions had a big impact on the syntactic processing of second language and its entrenchment.Moreover,the present study also provided implications for both English teaching and English learning from the perspective of language entrenchment theoretically and empirically.