An ERP Study On The Processing Of English Subjunctive Mood Contrary To The Past Facts By Chinese EFL Learners

Sentence processing and comprehension are the basis and essence of language comprehension.Scholars have argued about the role of syntactic processing and semantic processing in sentence processing,as well as the interplay between them.According to the traditional studies,syntactic and semantic processing are two crucial parts in sentence processing.The methods of traditional studies are limited to the research paradigm of reaction time,and failed to explored the mental mechanism of successive language processing.Then researchers begin to resort to event-related potentials(ERP)to associate sentence comprehension with brain activities,with which the behavioral and neurophysiological data could be collected simultaneously at the level of milliseconds.Then controversy mainly focuses on ERP responses elicited by syntactic and semantic processing and the interplay between them,and some representative models have been put forward based on syntactic-centered theory and semantic-centered theory.Three-phase Sentence Model(Friederici,2002),which is the representative of syntactic-centered theory,denies the interplay between semantic processing and syntactic processing.It maintains that syntactic processing is autonomous from the very early stage and overrules semantic processing.While Extended Argument Dependency Model(eADM)(Bornkessel & Schlesewsky,2006),which supports semantic-centered theory,maintains that semantic processing plays the leading role and can facilitate syntactic analysis in language processing.Besides,studies of event-related potentials(ERP)have mainly conducted on the first language including French,German,Dutch,English and other Indo-European languages,and participants are usually native language speakers.Besides,the experimental materials are usually simple syntactic structures.However,the mental mechanism of complex structure sentence processing by Chinese native speakers with English as their second language has not been fully explored.The current study was conducted on native Chinese language speakers with English as their second language.And a complex syntactic structure,simple fact past of subjunctive mood which begins with ‘if' was chosen as the experimental materials,and the key verb in the main clause was taken as the critical word.The experiment materials were presented in correct condition,syntactic anomaly,semantic anomaly and combined anomaly respectively.Meanwhile,40 Chinese English as a foreign language(EFL)learners were divided into two groups(Group H and L,each group contains 20 subjects)according to the second language(L2)proficiency.The subjects were strictly screened to explore the role of second language(L2)proficiency in sentence processing.The study addresses the following questions: 1.In the processing of English subjunctive mood,what are the ERP responses generated by two groups of subjects under four conditions? 2.Do ERP responses vary with second language(L2)proficiency? 3.What theories and models of sentence processing can be supported by the results of this experiment? Based on the analyses and summaries of collected behavioral and EEG data,three questions have been answered in the following part:(1)In terms of the syntactic anomaly,an ELAN/LAN-P600 effect was evoked in both groups.And it confirmed that subjects between groups shared a similar mental mechanism though there were some differences in the mean amplitude,distributed scalp and latency.Compared with Group L,data in Group H showed that the mean amplitude was generally more significant,the distributed scalps were more intensive and the latency was shorter.Thus subjects with high second language(L2)proficiency were more sensitive to the syntactic processing.(2)As for the semantic anomaly,an N400-P600 effect was elicited in both groups.Generally,the P600 effect under the semantic anomaly of animacy was supposed to be a semantic P600.It is worth mentioning that the P600 effect in Group L was a syntactic P600 which was different from the semantic P600 in Group H in nature.Hence subjects with high second language(L2)proficiency processed the semantic anomaly more like native language speakers.(3)In response to the combined anomaly,an ELAN-LAN/N400-P600 effect was generated in both groups,which fully confirmed the interplay between syntactic processing and semantic processing in the second phase of sentence processing.And subjects with high second language(L2)proficiency mainly rely on syntactic processing in the combined anomaly while those with low second language(L2)proficiency may rely more on the semantic processing.(4)Neither could Three-phase Sentence Model cover the interaction between syntactic processing and semantic processing in the combined anomaly,nor could Extended Argument Dependency Model(eADM)explain LAN effect appeared in the second phase of Group H under combined anomaly.Thus the revised model based on Three-phase Sentence Model was tentatively proposed to explain ERP components elicited in this study.The revised model divides sentence processing into three phases: the first phase(100-200ms)is responsible for structure building and identification of word category,and the second phase(300-450ms)is divided into two streams which are interplayed with each other,and it mainly deals with morphosyntactic processing and semantic information processing.The LAN effect appears when subjects process syntactic violations,while the N400 effect appears when subjects process semantic violations.The last phase(500-700ms)is the reanalysis and integration of sentence information,and it is also divided into two kinds: well-formedness analysis and general mapping,and the corresponding P600 effect would appear.Based on all the ERP responses evoked in this study,it could be fully confirmed that second language(L2)proficiency does play an important role in sentence processing.The ERP components which could not be fully covered by previous theories and models are mainly due to the subjects and experimental materials,which are different from previous studies.To be specific,the subjects were native Chinese language speakers with English as their second language,and the syntactic structure used was the English Subjunctive mood.This study is of high theoretical and practical significances.It not only renews the previous theories and models and adds more empirical data to ERP studies,but sheds light on English learning and teaching for Chinese students with different language proficiencies.