An Empirical Study Of L2 Pronoun Comprehension By Chinese Learners Of English

Based on Principle C of the Binding Theory,this study has conducted an online experiment on L2 English learners' pronoun comprehension via E-prime 2.0,and compared the asymmetrical processing under three syntactic and contextual conditions.According to the English proficiency of the L2 leaners,this study adapted the sentence examples from Sutton(2015),Conroy and Thornton(2005),Kazanina(2005),Guasti and Chierchia(2000),Hirst and Brill(1980)etc.as experimental materials and used E-prime 2.0 to investigate the relationship between the pronoun comprehension and Principle C constraint,the comparison between name-pronoun sequence and pronoun-name sequence governed by Principle C,and the interaction between syntax and discourse in comprehension of pronoun reference in second language acquisition.SPSS 22.0 was used to analyze the data of the experiments.Principle C rules that an R-expression is free(Chomsky,1981),and cannot be bound by a pronoun that c-commands it,which is usually demonstrated as pronoun-name sequence.However,in such a sequence,there is also a condition that is not governed by Principle C.Based on this,we compared the pronoun comprehension in pronoun-name sequence governed by Principle C with name-pronoun sequence,pronoun-name sequence ungoverned by Principle C and the influence of discourse information on it to investigate the acquisition of pronoun by Chinese learners of English.The findings show that: 1)in structures constrained by binding Principle,pronouns in pronoun-name sequence are better understood than pronouns in name-pronoun sequence.2)Chinese learners of English show constrained effect in pronoun-name sequence governed by Principle C,and better acquisition than those ungoverned by Principle C;3)Discourse has a stronger influence on elementary and intermediate Chinese learners' comprehension of L2 English pronouns than advanced learners.A detailed discussion is made mainly based on variable binding and covaluation(coreference)theory of Reinhart(2011)and “shallow” and “deep” processing theory of Koornneef and Reuland(2016).The study shows that Principle C is already active in the syntactic knowledge of Chinese L2 learners in the acquisition of English pronoun,but the extent to which the L2 learners have mastered is different according to their English proficiency.They have difficulty in coordinating syntactic knowledge with discourse information.