The Influence Of Second Language Working Memory Capacity And Proficiency On Advanced English Learners' Syntactic Processing

There are a large number of English learners in China nowadays.It is essential to master a good syntactic processing ability to learn a foreign language.Both English majors and non-English majors are more or less influenced by their mother tongue,and their English proficiency has been in an interlanguage state.A large number of studies have confirmed that there are certain difficulties in the syntactic processing of the second language,and the scores of grammatical judgment or syntactic information recognition are significantly lower than those of early learners or native speakers(Pakulak & Neville,2011).Understanding the factors that lead to the difficulties encountered by secondlanguage learners in the process of syntactic processing,and seeking ways to solve these difficulties,is an important way to promote their English learning for second-language learners.From previous studies,it can be concluded that second language working memory capacity and proficiency are two factors,which would affect the syntactic processing of second language learners.The influence of the working memory capacity and proficiency of the second language has been a hotspot for linguistic studies.It is rare to see some scholars in the previous studies of the second language use the voice judgment task as the experiment materials to explore the relationship among the syntactic processing ability,proficiency and working memory capacity of the second language.Second language working memory capacity and proficiency are two factors which affect the syntactic processing of second language learners.The study investigates whether there is a correlation between these two factors,if there is a correlation how second language working memory capacity affect syntactic processing ability of second language learners with the same or similar proficiency,how second language proficiency affect syntactic processing ability of second language learners with the same or similar working memory capacity,and under the combined influence of second language working memory capacity and proficiency,how second language learners improve their syntactic processing ability.The author analyzes the data and discusses the results,and makes several suggestions to Chinese English learners.The study indicates that 1)there are individual differences in the working memory capacity of second language learners.The working memory capacity is affected by individual experience.2)The second language proficiency affects the logical judgment of a sentence to a large extent.Working memory capacity is affected by second language proficiency to a certain extent,that is to say,the higher the proficiency,the large the working memory capacity,however,the process is very slow.3)When the processing difficulty of the second language material is within the reach of the second language learners and so is that of the working memory capacity,the accuracy of their syntactic processing judgment is not significantly affected by the working memory capacity but affected more by the proficiency.4)Judging from the reaction time,second language learners with large working memory capacity are significantly more efficient in syntactic processing that those with small working memory capacity,which to a certain,supports “A Capacity Theory”.5)With the same working memory capacity,subjects with higher proficiency have high accuracy and high processing speed;however,with the same proficiency,subjects with different working memory capacity has the same processing speed.