Context Effect Of L2 Conditionals Online Processing

This paper aims to study context effect of L2 conditionals online processing.In this paper,second language research refers to the linguistic study with Chinese as the first language and English as the second language,thus the second language conditional sentences are English conditionals.English conditionals are complex and diverse,which mainly reflects in the English conditional semantic information varying with the forms of the predicate verbs.Generally,context effect signifies that preceding context assists the processing of ongoing words or sentences.Due to the complexity and diversity of English conditionals and the difference of language proficiency owned by learners,three research questions are proposed in this paper: 1)Does context exert an influence on the processing of English conditionals? 2)Does the processing of indicative,hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals have significant differences? 3)Does L2 proficiency exert an influence on the processing of English conditionals?We carried out two experiments,in which participants reacted to the words presented on the computer screen by pressing specified keys and making judgment.In the first experiment,58 learners were selected as our participants,among whom 29 belonged to advanced learners and the other 29 belonged to intermediate learners.The study objects were three kinds of conditionals: indicative conditionals,hypothetical conditionals and counterfactual conditionals.The second experiment was an additional one designed to verify the results of the first experiment,in which the participants were 30 Chinese students with a low-level English proficiency.The study objects were indicative conditionals and hypothetical conditionals.We collected the response time of predicate verbs of conditional clauses with the help of E-Prime2.0 self-paced reading method,and used the statistical software SPSS 20.0 ANOVA to analyze the results.In the first experiment,the results showed that 1)context indeed had an influence onthe processing of English conditionals and the context effect varied with the types of the conditionals.Among them,indicative conditionals had a facilitating effect in consistent context,but for hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals,there was no promotion effect in consistent context.2)Under the constraints of context,there were also processing differences among conditionals.Among them,there was a processing difference between indicative conditionals and hypothetical conditionals: the processing speed of indicative conditionals was faster than that of hypothetical conditionals.The processing difference also went to indicative conditionals and counterfactual conditionals: the processing speed of counterfactual conditionals was faster than that of indicative conditionals.3)English language proficiency did affect the processing of English conditionals.On the whole,the processing time of conditionals increased with the improvement of the language proficiency.In the additional experiment,we used the same experimental materials and methods,and found that both indicative conditionals and hypothetical conditionals had context priming effect.For indicative conditionals,consistent context promoted indicative conditional processing while inconsistent context inhibited the processing,which is different from hypothetical conditionals.In addition,through the comparison of the two experimental results,it was found that consistent context assisted indicative conditional processing,but for hypothetical conditionals,consistent context prohibited the processing of hypothetical conditionals in the first experiment while the consistent context assisted the processing of hypothetical conditionals.The comprehension of English conditionals is one of the basic problems that affect English learners to improve their English grammars and English reading comprehension.This study assumes that the context effect of English conditionals processed by Chinese EFL learners is mainly influenced by the following factors: first,the interaction among language modules;second,the level of lexical activation;third,the level of pragmatic and syntactic constraints;fourth,the English language proficiency of Chinese learners.We hope that the present study will benefit foreign language teaching and research.