Effects Of Working Memory Capacity And Subject Type Factors On Resolution Of English Pronoun Him In High School Students

At present,there are some disputes about whether the features of noun phrase in subject position affect the resolution of pronouns.Nico&Swinney?1989?found that the features noun phrases in subject position affect the resolution of possessive pronouns,but not object pronouns.However,Kennison?2003?and Sturt?2003?found that locational noun phrases in subject position affect the resolution of both possessive and object pronouns.In addition,there is no consensus on whether working memory capacity affects pronoun resolution at home and abroad.The study of Felser et al.?2009?and Liu Xiaoping?2020?found that differences in working memory capacity did not cause individual differences in pronoun resolution.The study of Mohammad Nowbakht?2019?shows that working memory capacity can significantly affect pronoun resolution.So the author takes 60senior two students in a high school as the research subjects,takes the object pronoun him as the test point,and studies whether the working memory capacity and subject type factors affect the resolution of high school students'pronoun him through the online test of the test software E-Prime.The test is divided into two parts,one is the working memory capacity test with the content of arithmetic word in a group,the other is the online pronoun resolution test with the content of the pronoun him in a single sentence.The data were analyzed by SPSS21.0,including two-way ANOVA,one-way ANOVA and correlation analysis,trying to answer the following three questions:?1?How about the working memory capacity of Chinese high school students??2?Does noun phrase in subject position affect the resolution of pronoun him in online test??3?Does working memory capacity affect the resolution of pronoun him in online test?The results are as follows:?1?In the online test of working memory capacity,the average score of information processing ability,information storage ability and total working memory capacity is 0.3389,0.2209 and 0.5464 respectively.Among them,through paired sample t-test analysis,the information processing ability and information storage ability of the subjects were significantly different with P=0.000.?2?In the online test of the resolution of English pronoun him,taking the response time of the pronoun him as the dependent variable,the working memory capacity and the subject type as the independent variable,a two factor ANOVA of2×3 was carried out,and the main effect of subject type is significant with F?1,179?=63.852 and P=0.000,indicating that the noun phrases in subject position affected the resolution of pronoun him.?3?The main effect of working memory capacity significant with F?1,179?=2.473 and P=0.003,which shows that working memory capacity affects the resolution of pronoun him.There was a significant negative correlation between the working memory capacity and the resolution time of the pronoun him with R₁=-0.636 and P₁=0.000,R₂=-0.431 and P₂=0.001 and R₃=-0.299 and P₃=0.01.The results show that:?1?High school students have higher scores in mathematical formula judgment than in word recall,indicating that the information processing ability in working memory is higher than that in information storage,which is the same as the research of Ni Jincheng?2017?.?2?Noun phrase in subject position significantly affect the resolution of the pronoun him in senior high school students,specifically in the face of male person,female person and plural person,there is a significant difference in the resolution time of the pronoun him with P=0.000.This finding is the same as the research of Wu Mingjun?2016?,Kennison?2003?.?3?Working memory capacity significantly affected the resolution of the pronoun him in senior high school students with P=0.003,which is the same as the research of Mohammad Nowbakht?2019?,but different from the study of Liu Xiaoping?2020?.?4?These findings can be explained by the binding theory?Chomsky,1981?and the working memory theory?Baddeley&hatch,1974?.Therefore,in high school English teaching,we should fully understand the characteristics of students'working memory,strengthen the practice of pronoun resolution under different syntactic types,exercise students'memory ability to improve their memory capacity and pay attention to the differences of working memory capacity between L1 and L2 subjects.