Chinese EFL Learners' Acquisition Of English Fake Past

Based on the Wiltschko's theory about past tense morphology,the present study investigates acquisitional differences between two readings of past tense morphology with E-prime 2.0.There are always two readings for some forms of the language: indexical reading and bound variable reading.The indexical reading is deemed as the basic and default meaning of a certain form,whereas the bound variable reading is the derived and fake meaning.Past tense morphology is the typical form which possesses indexical and bound variable reading at the same time.On one hand,the real past usage or the past temporal meaning is the basic reading of past tense morphology.On the other hand,the fake past usage of past tense morphology or counterfactual meaning is the derived and bound variable meaning,which can be interpreted as the inconsistency between meaning and form.Given that there are few studies engaging in the empirical study to compare two different readings of past tense morphology,the present study investigates its acquisitional differences through self-designed experiment in an attempt to serve as a suggestion for the second language acquisition.Wiltschko puts forward that the syntax mediates the relation between the form and meaning.The inconsistency of form and meaning is resulted out by the change of syntactic position.Thus,compared with the real past,the syntactic context of fake past is considered more complicated.Based on this difference,the present study borrows the explanatory power of Wiltschko's universal syntactic spine hypothesis and other related theories to conduct the research.E-prime2.0,the common psychological experimental software,is used to program the experiment and collect the data needed.60 qualified subjects are chosen and grouped into 2 proficiency groups according to their scores of QPT(2001)tests.The subjects are required to conduct the truth value judgement task through self-speed reading of the experimental material,which was managed by the E-prime 2.0 through a laptop.The present study takes the 4 subcategories of the real past and fake past(past time and past perfect time of real past;counter to present and future,and counter to past of fake past)as the research material,including 40 sets of experimental sentences and 10 sets of interference sentences.Each set of the material consists of an objective sentence and a judgement sentence.The response time of the verbs in main clause in each sentence and the accuracy rate are recorded as the main measurement index of acquisition.The data collected is led in to SPSS 20.0 to conduct the two-way ANOVA analysis and the results of the experiment as follow: 1)there are significant acquisitional differences between the real past and fake past of subjects.Moreover,the acquisition of real past is better than that of fake past;2)The acquisition of the fake past and real past of subjects change with the learner's language proficiency: higher proficiency level leads to better acquisition of the target form.Although the response time of advanced group is significantly longer than that of intermediate group,the former group performs higher accuracy rate than the latter one;3)symmetry relation can be found in the acquisition of subcategories of fake past,while the acquisition of the subcategories of real past is deemed as asymmetric.According to the above results,we put forward that there are significant acquisitional differences between fake past and real past of Chinese EFL learners and the degree of acquisition changes with the proficiency level of Chinese EFL learners.As for the acquisitional differences,the present study mainly resorts to Wiltschko's universal syntactic spine hypothesis and its related theories to explain this phenomenon.We think that the complicated syntactic context and unique way of valuing the INFL are the major causes for acquisitional difficulty of fake past.In addition,we attribute advanced group's longer response time and higher accuracy rate than that of intermediate group to the differences in processing method.Advanced group who has better syntactic ability adopts deep processing,which results in long response time and high accuracy rate.On the contrary,intermediate group with limited language ability performs shallow processing which lead to short response time and low accuracy rate.Finally,in our opinion,the reason why there are significant differences between the subcategories of real past is that the influence of language transfer,higher processing cost and higher threshold value of past perfect tense.