A Study Of L2 Processing Of Chinese Movement And Base-generated Topic Sentences By CSL Learners

Since the language typology theory of Li & Thompson(1976),languages were classified into topic-prominent languages and subject-prominent languages.It has aroused wide discussion to Chinese topic structure and its acquisition in second language acquisition.This study mainly focused on the second language processing of Chinese topic sentences by English,Korean/Japanese learners.It studied topic sentences in which topics and subjects could be easily distinguished depending on shallow syntactic structure.This research adopted the categorization of Cao et al.(2009)and classified topic sentences into two types: topic sentences with gaps and base-generated topic sentences.Topic sentences with gaps are derived through movement and had filler-gap dependencies.They are designed to test Chinese as a Second Language(CSL)learners’ processing of syntactic structure.While Chinese base-generated topic sentences are more constrained by semantic relations,they are applied to figure out whether CSL learners rely on the semantic cues.The present study studied the processing of Chines movement and base-generated topic sentences by CSL learners of different language backgrounds.The experimental group consisted of 40 native English speakers and 40 native Korean/Chinese speakers from different universities in Guangdong province and Hubei province.They were all regarded as advanced CSL learners because they all passed HSK 5 level and studied in Chinese for more than 5 years.Control group consisted of 40 native Chinese speakers from non-English majors.Two tasks were conducted in this experiment to explore CSL learners’ interlanguage representation as well as sentence processing,they were grammatical judgment task(AJT)and moving window self-paced reading task(SPRT).Only those who passed the AJT task were qualified to do the on-line SPRT task.Data collected through the two tasks were analyzed with the statistical and analytical IBM SPSS Statistics 22.0.Three conclusions are drawn in this study.First,when processing two types of topic sentences,all the advanced CSL learners tend to analyze them based on the simplest SVO structure.Second,significant Mather Tongue Transfer effect is found among three groups of subjects.Subjects with topic-prominent language feature spend less time on processing Chinese topic sentences than those with subject-prominent language feature.Third,results also show that these advanced CSL learner can process Chinese topic sentence as Chinese native speakers do.No evidence is found in this experiment showed that CSL learners’ second language(L2)processing is shallow.On the contrary,data in my study indicate that just like Chinese native speakers,those advanced CSL learners are sensitive to syntactic cues when processing two types of Chinese topic sentences.However,compared to Yuan’s(2009)study,no apparent evidence is found to prove that those CSL learners are sensitive to semantic cues in L2 processing.In brief,those conclusions in my study are inconsistent with what predicated by Shallow Structure Hypothesis(SSH).It is possible for CSL learners to have native-like syntactic processing after a long period study of the target sentence structure.Those findings also give some enlightenment on CSL teaching.Reflecting on the current study,there is still much room for improvement.First,the number of participants should be increased.Second,words frequency in testing sentences should be strictly controlled to make the results more convincing.Third,more other factors,such as working memory capacity and processing speed should be considered in the future.