The Role Of Discourse Context And Animacy In English Semantic Processing

Language comprehension has a complicated hierarchy.In recent years,event-related potential technology has been widely used in semantic and syntactic processing researches due to its advantages of high resolution of time and multi-dimensional detection.Scholars found that classical ERPs components related to language comprehension mainly included N400 referring to the semantic processing and P600 referring to the syntactic processing.However,many empirical studies in recent years have found that such one-to-one relationship between those components and semantic or syntactic processing has been broken.In particular,the discovery of a semantic P600 effect has triggered a heated discussion on the functional roles of those components and various theoretical sentence processing models.At the same time,the author noticed that most domestic researchers in this field paid more attention to the language processing within local sentences,while the studies about Chinese EFL learners' processing mechanism with the involvement of context were relatively neglected.So it was necessary to explore the mechanism of sentence processing at the discourse level.All these led up to three research questions in this study.The author tried to explore the functional role of semantic P600,the processing mechanism in language understanding of Chinese EFL learners,and the role of context in sentence processing with ERPs technology.In this paper,30 graduate students whose native language was Chinese and second language was English were selected as subjects in the experiment.Using the paradigm of contravention,the author compared different ERPs components elicited by semantic processing of English sentences under four conditions with Animacy and Context as two independent variables in hope of answering the proposed research questions and providing empirical evidences for the existing sentence processing model as well as suggestions for Chinese EFL learners.The results of this experiment were as follows.Sentential-level semantic correctsentences elicited an anteriorly distributed semantic P600 effect.Sentential-level semantic anomaly elicited a widely distributed delayed N400 effect,while no obvious processing difficulties occurred under the condition of the contextual-level semantic congruence.At last,contextual-level semantic anomaly elicited a anteriorly and centrally distributed semantic P600 effect again.There were mainly three findings.Firstly,animacy violation and context were important factors to trigger the semantic P600 effect,but they were not prerequisites.As long as the sentence processing encountered difficulties in the joint analysis of multiple streams,even semantically correct sentences that did not have obvious animacy violations could trigger a semantic P600 effect.So the semantic P600 essentially reflected the degree of difficulties of semantic integration in the generalized mapping step.Secondly,the ERPs results of this experiment were more consistent with the semantic-centered eADM model.Thirdly,contexts could help build an optimized path in the sentence processing and overrule the semantic anomaly,therefore played an important coordinating role in the language comprehension.