二语形态句法在线加工实验研究——以英语主谓一致为例

Experimental Researches on Online Processing of L2 Morphosyntax—A Case Study of English Subject-Verb Agreement

本文旨在探究中国英语学习者对主谓一致性的习得情况,采用在线语法判断实验任务,对主语的数,数标记和主谓之间的距离进行实验语料设计。结果发现,复数具有明显的标记性且句法标记性要强于形态标记。另外,相比主谓局部依存结构,中国英语学习者在线加工主谓长距离依存结构存在困难,体现在较低正确率,较长的反应时。实验结果基本符合表征屈折成分缺失假说。

The purpose of this paper is to explore the acquisition of subject-verb agreement among Chinese EFL learners. An online grammaticality judgment task is adopted, and variables of the number of subjects, number markedness and the distance between the subjects and the verbs are taken into consideration in this experiment. And the results show that plural nouns have obvious markedness in number. Further, syntactic markedness is stronger than morphological markedness in number. In addition, compared with the subject-verb local dependencies, Chinese English learners have difficulty processing the subject-verb long-distance dependencies, which is reflected in the lower accuracy rate and longer response time. The experimental results are basically in line with the Representational Deficit Hypothesis.