A Study On The Processing Of Subject,Object And Adjunct Relative Clause Of Chinese Second Language Learners

In second language learning,syntax is more difficult to acquire than vocabulary and semantics.Because of its unique syntactic structure,Chinese relative clauses also pose a challenge to second language learners.In the past,the research on second language relative clauses has mostly focused on Chinese English learners,but paid less attention to Chinese second language learners.In addition,there are more research on output and less research on processing process.Using the methods of self-paced reading experiment and word/phrase decision tasks,this thesis studies whether Chinese second language learners can automatically use syntactic knowledge to process Subject,Object and Adjunct relative clauses and the processing difficulty of three different relative clauses.The research conclusions are as follows:1.The response time data of Chinese second language learners show that the head in subject relative clauses is processed with the fastest speed,in object relative clauses the second,and the adjunct relative clauses the slowest and meanwhile processing the critical words without context shows no significant difference.This indicates that Chinese second language learners are sensitive to the syntactic structures,and can use syntactic knowledge for automatic processing,which does not support the Shallow Structure Hypothesis in second language processing.In addition,the processing difficulty of the three relational clauses is different,among which the subject relational clause has the lowest difficulty.It confirms the Structural Distance Hypothesis.2.Among the three Chinese relative clauses,the accuracy rate of Adjunct relative clause is the highest and that of Subject relative clause is the lowest,which is asymmetric with the data of online reaction time.This shows that Chinese second language learners’ explicit and implicit knowledge of relative clauses is asymmetric.According to the experimental results,this thesis puts forward corresponding teaching suggestions from the perspectives of teachers and students.From the perspective of teachers,this thesis puts forward four suggestions: paying attention to the teaching of Chinese clauses,teaching step by step,promoting the transformation from explicit knowledge to implicit knowledge,and cultivating students’ ability to communicate with Chinese relative clauses.From the perspective of students,this thesis proposes that Chinese second language learners should take the initiative to learn Chinese relative clauses.This thesis provides empirical evidence for the research on the processing mechanism of Chinese relative clauses.At the same time,it helps to enrich the literature in the field of second language sentence processing and has certain theoretical and practical value.