二语学习者暂时歧义句加工研究

A study on EFL learners’ processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences

句子理解过程不仅得益于词汇单元自下而上的顺序输入,来自高层表征的语义信息同样可能对句法构建产生预测作用。本研究采用移动窗口技术,考察不同水平的二语学习者对暂时歧义句的加工情况。结果发现,二语学习者能够利用动词偏向和that线索对句法结构进行预测。高水平学习者具有更多的句法自主性,能在加工早期完成各类信息的加工和整合,且当词汇的句法信息与that线索相匹配时更具加工优势;低水平二语学习者并不具有句法解读能力,他们更多地利用词汇语义信息来进行预测处理,往往只能在加工晚期利用句尾补偿策略完成句子理解。本研究从加工策略及词汇表征等方面对发现进行了解释。

When understanding sentences,we not only benefit from the bottom-up processing of word units,but also from the semantic information on the higher-level representation,which is of great help in predicting a syntactic structure.By adopting the moving window technique,this study investigates the role of proficiency in EFL learners’ understanding of temporarily ambiguous sentences.Results indicate that EFL learners succeeded to predict syntactic structure with verb bias and "that" complementizer.Participants with high-level L2 proficiency use syntactic knowledge to understand sentences at ear-lier stages,signaling learners’ better syntactic competence.Still,their reading speeds are slow due to the lack of L2 resources in real-time processing.In contrast,participants with low-level proficiency tend to benefit from lexical-semantic information,and the weak integration of this information occuits only at later stages because of the inadequate L2 vocabulary.We attempt to explain our findings from the perspective of lexical representation and processing strategies.