跨语言句法相似性对二语句法加工的影响——来自中国英语学习者的ERP证据

The effect of cross-linguistic syntactic similarity on L2 syntactic processing——The ERP evidence from Chinese learners of English

本文以汉语为母语的英语学习者为受试,运用事件相关电位技术(Eventrelated Potentials,ERPs)和语法判断任务,通过考察跨语言相似的主谓语序、不相似的被动语态标记以及二语独特的否定副词部分倒装句的加工,探讨了跨语言句法相似性对二语句法加工的影响。实验结果发现,高水平和低水平学习者在加工英汉相似的句法结构时都诱发了P600,表明英汉句法相似性在较大程度上影响二语句法的加工。通过比较高、低水平组,我们发现了句法结构相似性与二语水平之间的交互作用。低水平组只在加工相似句法违反构式时才会诱发P600,而高水平组在加工不相似的句法违反构式时也诱发了P600,尽管它与加工相似句法违反构式中诱发的P600相比振幅和头皮分布范围都较小。依据本实验和相关研究,与高水平学习者相比,低水平学习者更多受跨语言句法相似性的影响。本实验结果与统一竞争模式解释是一致的。

The present study employed ERP and a grammaticality judgment task to explore the effect of cross-linguistic syntactic similarity on L2 syntactic processing by examining how native Chinese learners of English process three different syntactic constructions varying in degrees of syntactic similarity between English and Chinese: Subject-verb word order that is instantiated similarly in English and Chinese, passive voice marking that differs in English and Chinese, and ‘negative inversion' that is unique to English. The results indicated that late Chinese learners of English with high and low levels of proficiency could evoke the P600 for subject-verb word order violations, suggesting that cross-linguistic syntactic similarity affected syntactic processing in L2 to a large extent. By comparing groups of high and low levels of proficiency, we demonstrated that crosslinguistic syntactic similarity interacted with L2 proficiency levels. Low-proficiency L2 learners were only sensitive to violations of the similar constructions. The high-proficiency L2 learners, in contrast, showed sensitivity not only to similar constructions, but also to different constructions, though the P600 observed for the violations of the latter is smaller in amplitudes and distribution. Results of the present experiment are in accordance with explanations of Unified Competition Model.