| Different from English,Chinese conveys grammatical relationships without using inflection morphemes.Due to the lack of grammatical morphology in Chinese,subject-verb number agreement remains an obstacle for Chinese learners of English.Previous studies have been conducted on the processing and acquisition of subject-verb agreement by adopting different methods.Some researchers have used self-paced reading tasks to trace native speakers and non-native speakers’ reaction time of processing the subject-verb agreement to explore learners’ sensitivity to subject-verb agreement violations.Some have used event-related potentials to investigate the specific patterns of event-related potential responses associated with subject-verb agreement processing to investigate the neurocognitive mechanism of subject-verb agreement acquisition.However,most previous researches have focused on the learners of English with high levels of proficiency.Little attention was paid to senior high school students.This study aims at exploring the online processing of subject-verb agreement under the paradigm of number attraction in Chinese senior high school students by using a self-paced reading task.Two main research questions addressed in this study are as follows:(1)Will Chinese senior high school students be sensitive to subject-verb number agreement violations in online processing?(2)Will the number properties of the local noun affect Chinese senior high school students’ subject-verb agreement judgements?Thirty-four students from a senior high school in Jiangsu Province were presented with fifty-four sentences,including eighteen target stimuli and thirty-six fillers by E-prime software.According to the grammaticality of sentence and the number property of local nouns,all the experiment sentences were divided into four sentence types,SPS,SPP,PSP,PSS.Participants were instructed to make acceptability-judgement,and their accuracy rates and reaction time were recorded automatically.The major findings are summarized as follows:Firstly,Chinese senior high school students are not sensitive to subject-verb number agreement violations.Due to number attraction,they failed to retrieve the subject nouns.That is,they mistakenly matched the predicates with distractors nouns.This finding suggests that senior high school students are inclined to employ linear distance processing rather than hierarchical distance processing which native speakers are prone to.Secondly,the number of local nouns has no significant effect on the judgment of subject-verb agreement.That is,the plural local noun and the singular local noun elicited similar subject-verb agreement errors rate in online processing for senior high school students.This result is interpreted as disproving the view that a plural local noun is a more effective attractor than a singular one.The findings of this study would shed light on subject-verb number agreement acquisition and teaching.The attractor noun can cause difficulty in acquisition,and more attention should be paid to instructing students to analyze syntactic structure rather than merely depend on semantic information in comprehending agreement in classroom teaching. |
