Effects Of Accessibility And Animacy On Processing English Relative Clauses By Chinese Senior High School Students

English relative clause has attracted the attention of linguists and scholars in second language acquisition for a long time due to its unique and complex syntactic structure.Over the past decades,numerous studies have attempted to explore the processing of RCs via different offline methods,such as the grammaticality judgment test,the sentence completion test,etc.In recent years,there is a growing body of literature that utilizes online methods to examine L2 learners’ language comprehension processes in real-time.However,most studies on the processing of English RCs have been restricted to native speakers and college students,and far too little attention paid to Chinese high school students’ processing of English RCs.Therefore,the present study sets out to unravel how accessibility and animacy influence Chinese high school students’ capacity to comprehend and produce four types of English relative clauses by conducting both offline and online tests.Therefore,three research questions as follows are discussed:1)What is the processing difficulty order in processing different types of English RCs by Chinese high school students in two different tests(the self-paced reading task and the sentence combination test)?Does it correspond with the prediction assumed by the NPAH?2)What is the difficulty order affected by animacy in processing different types of English RCs by Chinese high school students in two different tests(the self-paced reading task and the sentence combination test)?3)How do accessibility and animacy function together to influence Chinese high school students’ processing of different types of English RCs?To resolve the questions above,a total of 127 Chinese senior high students in Grade two were recruited to investigate the difficulty order of processing English relative clauses through the sentence combination test and the self-paced reading task.The elicitation materials were developed on the basis of Hamilton’s(1994)and Traxler et al.’s(2002)research.The data obtained from the two tests were submitted to a twoway repeated measures analysis of variance(ANOVA)via SPSS 23.0.The principal findings of this research are:1)The results of the sentence combination test reveal that the difficulty order of producing English RCs is in agreement with the prediction of the NPAH.However,according to the data gathered from the self-paced reading task,the subject RCs are not always easier to comprehend than the direct object RCs,which is inconsistent with the NPAH.Meanwhile,accessibility has no main significant effect on participants’ comprehension of RCs.2)Based on the results of the sentence combination test,it is found that the subject RCs with animate antecedents are easier to process than the ones with inanimate antecedents,whereas it is more challenging to process the direct object RCs with animate antecedents than the ones with inanimate antecedents.Similar conclusions are obtained by analyzing reading times of region 2(RC region).3)Accessibility and animacy function together to have a significant impact on how Chinese senior high students process different types of RCs.They probably are not capable enough to utilize syntactic information(e.g.,RC type)as much as native speakers do during sentence processing.However,they definitely are able to apply lexical-semantic cues(e.g.,animacy)during real-time sentence comprehension,which diminished the subject advantage.The findings reported in the current study not only shed light on the role of accessibility and animacy in the processing of English relative clauses but provide profound insights into teaching English relative clauses in high school EFL classrooms.Teachers should highlight the potential usefulness of the difficulty order of processing RCs while designing teaching procedures and teaching materials.Meanwhile,they should also guide senior high school students to learn how to comprehend English RCs by coping with syntactical information.