An ERP Study On English Subjunctive Mood By Chinese EFL Learners

In the traditional researches of language comprehension,syntactic processing and semantic processing are two inextricably related parts.Over the last several decades,scholars have shown an increasing interest in psychological mechanism of language processing.Traditional behavioral experiments were confined to the research paradigm of reaction time,which merely reflected the outcome of sentence processing superficially and failed to describe the real-time and successive language comprehension from the psychological perspective.Accordingly,a proliferation of ERP in language processing has facilitated the theoretical development in this field.The controversy about sentence processing mainly focuses on the ERP components evoked by syntactic processing and semantic processing under different language scenarios and the interrelation between them,on which previous researches have put forward several mature sentence processing models on the basis of syntactic-centered theory and semantic-centered theory.However,most of the current studies on sentence processing concentrated on the Indo-European languages such as English,Dutch and German,and the subjects are mostly native speakers.Hence,the studies on the sentence processing mechanisms of native Chinese speakers with English as their second language have not been fully explored.The current study attempts to probe into the neural substrates of Chinese EFL learners on English subjunctive mood by adopting event-related potentials(ERPs),involving syntactic and semantic processing in complex sentence as well as L2 proficiency.The object clauses with specific verbs(e.g.demand,suggest,insist),containing the imperative meaning of command or request,and key verbs in the clause as the critical word,were selected as experimental materials in order to figure out the relationship between syntactic and semantic processing.Meanwhile,40 selected Chinese EFL learners across the proficiency spectrum were divided into two groups according to strict screening,so as to investigate the role of L2 proficiency insentence processing.This experiment was designed to figure out the following questions: 1)How do Chinese EFL learners process English subjunctive mood and what kind of ERP components would be elicited under different anomalies? 2)Which theories or models proposed by previous researches will be supported by the results of this experiment? 3)Will L2 proficiency play a role in processing mechanisms of English subjunctive mood? To what extent?In terms of the analyzed behavioral and EEG statistics,the results indicate that:(1)With regard to syntactic anomaly,an ELAN/LAN-P600 effect was elicited in both groups,which conforms to previous findings(e.g.Hagoort et al.,1993;Osterhout & Holcomb,1995;Kaan et al.,2000).It worth mentioning that the ELAN effect considered as the reflection of first-pass parsing emerged under both correct and syntactically anomalous sentence;under semantic anomaly,and a N400-P600 biphasic effect was elicited in both groups.Through comparison with control sentences and scalp distribution,we found the P600 here was actually a semantic P600;under combined anomaly,an ELAN/LAN-N400-P600 triphasic pattern was discovered in both groups.It reveals that the sentence processing and semantic processing are interactive instead of separating from each other.(2)On the basis of the results of the present study,there exists an interaction between syntactic processing and semantic processing.Moreover,the exsiting models proposed in previous researches cannot exclusively and comprehensively explain the semantic P600 effect generated under semantic anomaly,we tentatively jump out of the boundary of syntactic-centered theory and semantic-centered theory.Inspired by the Retrieval-Integration Model proposed by Brouwer et al.(2012),we cautiously proposed a hybrid sentence model which may be more applicable to Chinese EFL learners.(3)L2 proficiency influences the processing mechanism of English subjunctive mood of Chinese EFL learners to a large extent.From the perspective of average amplitude,the ERP amplitudes elicited by Group H are significantly greater than thatelicited by Group L under each anomaly,indicating that Group H are more sensitive to the syntactic incongruence and semantic violation.From scalp distribution,the ERP effects of Group L are more broadly distributed than that of Group H,indicating that Group L will mobilize more cognitive resources in processing English subjunctive moods.From the latency band,the latency time of the ERP effects in the Group L is generally longer than that in Group H,which reflects the difficulties they encountering in sentence processing to a certain extent.Although Chinese EFL learners with different proficiencies have similar sentence processing mechanisms,there do exist obvious differences due to different proficiencies.Syntactic processing predominates in the sentence processing of Group H and semantic processing serves as a facilitation,while Group L mainly rely on semantic integration in processing complex sentence and have difficulties in processing syntactic information.