Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Present Study
There are a large number of English learners in China nowadays. It is essential to master a good syntactic processing ability to learn a foreign language. Both English majors and non-English majors are more or less influenced by their mother tongue, and their English proficiency has been in an interlanguage state.
A large number of studies have confirmed that there are certain difficulties in the syntactic processing of the second language, and the scores of grammatical judgment or syntactic information recognition are significantly lower than those of early learners or native speakers (Pakulak & Neville, 2011). Understanding the factors that lead to the difficulties encountered by second-language learners in the process of syntactic processing, and seeking ways to solve these difficulties, is an important way to promote their English learning for second-language learners.
One of the important measures for the second language ability is Second Language Proficiency. Most of the previous studies have suggested that Second Language Syntactic Processing Ability is greatly affected by Second Language Proficiency. In recent years, some scholars have begun to study the factors which affect second language processing. McDonald (2006) believes that the differences in second language syntactic processing are not only affected by the Second Language Proficiency, but also by the Second Language Working Memory, and the latter affects the syntactic correctness to a large extent.
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1.2 Significance of the Study
There are a large number of English learners in China nowadays. It is essential to master a good syntactic processing ability to learn a foreign language. Both English majors and non-English majors are more or less influenced by their mother tongue, and their English proficiency has been in an interlanguage state. From previous studies, it can be concluded that second language working memory capacity and proficiency are two factors, which would affect the syntactic processing of second language learners. The influence of the working memory capacity and proficiency of the second language has been a hotspot for linguistic studies. It is rare to see some scholars in the previous studies using the voice judgment task as the experimental to explore the relationship among the syntactic processing ability, proficiency and working memory capacity of the second language. In summary, to what extent does the individual difference in the working memory capacity affect the syntactic processing of the second language, and to what extent does the individual difference in the efficiency affect the syntactic processing of the second language, and whether there is a correlation between working memory capacity and proficiency, are needed to discuss.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 The Neuropsychology of Second Language Acquisition
2.1.1 The Definition of Neuropsychology
Neuropsychology is the study of the structure and function of the brain as they relate to specific psychological processes and behaviors. Neuropsychology is both an experimental and clinical field of psychology which tries to explain how cognition and behavior are influenced by brain functioning and is concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of behavioral and cognitive effects of neurological disorders.
2.1.2 The Distinction between Neuropsychology and Neurology
Neuropsychology aims to find out how the brain correlates with the mind, while classical neurology focuses on the physiology of the nervous system. In general, neuropsychology shares a number of concepts and concerns with neurology.
There are mainly four fields of neuropsychology study, which are experimental neuropsychology, clinical neuropsychology, and cognitive neuropsychology.
Experimental neuropsychology aims to uncover the relationship between cognitive function and nervous system using approaches from experimental psychology. Most of the work involves studying healthy humans in a laboratory setting.
Clinical neuropsychology is mainly applied for assessment (neuropsychological tests and neuropsychological assessments), management, and rehabilitation of people, who suffer from injury or illness especially to the brain which cause neurocognitive problems. Most of the work often happens in hospital settings in a medical team which involves researchers or experts from different areas.
Cognitive neuropsychology is a new field of neuropsychology study. Researchers study subjects that suffer from brain injury or neurological illness and try to work out the mechanism of mind and brain. Cognitive neuropsychology has provided a number of complementary approaches for both experimental neuropsychology and clinical neuropsychology.
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2.2 Previous Studies of Syntactic Processing
The language used by humans for daily communication is mostly composed of sentences. Most languages, in order to satisfy the expression of meaning, contain at least two voices—active voice and passive voice. Of course, a sentence can also become complicated by embedding different components like attributive, adverbial, complements, etc. However, Bach, Brown, and Marson-Wilson (1986) found that humans are able to handle one to three embedded components. That is to say, the ability of humans to process a complex sentence is limited.
The integration of sentence components plays an important role in language processing. A sentence is constructed on the most simplified principle. That is to say, in a most simplified sentence, only the essential elements which conform to the syntax are indispensable. In Gibson’s study, the object is not an indispensable component in a sentence (Gibson, 1998). However, in passive sentences, the object occupies the position of the subject in term of spatial position.
The integration of the modifiers also plays an important role in the understanding of sentences. Modifiers do not affect the processing of the basic structure of a sentence, but they do serve the integration of the main components. Compared with the main components, the modifiers are generally unpredictable. From a linguistic point of view, the integration of modifiers varies widely. For instance, there is no syntactic dependence between a prepositional phrase and a modified noun, however, there is an integrated syntactic dependency between a noun and a relative pronoun (Konieczny & Hemforth, 2000).
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Chapter Three Research Methodology .................................. 23
3.1 Research Questions .............................. 23
3.2 Methods of Research ............................. 23
Chapter Four Results and Discussion .................................. 3
4.1 Data Analysis of Experiment 1 ............................ 31
4.2 Data Analysis of Experiment 2 .............................. 34
Chapter Five Conclusion ..................................... 37
5.1 Major Findings .................................. 37
5.2 Implications .............................. 38
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
4.1 Data Analysis of Experiment 1
In summary, the results of Figure 3.1 show that the working memory capacity of the three groups has an inverted U-shaped distribution with high middle and low ends. No matter of which group, subjects with medium working memory capacity are many and those with large or small working memory capacity are few. Through further comparison of the distribution of working memory capacity among Group I, Group II and Group III, it can be found out that the distribution of working memory capacity of the subjects with higher proficiency shows a right shift trend.
First of all, the differences in the accuracy and reaction time among each sentence type is not obvious. And almost all the accuracy is 0.85 or above. It proved that the sentences used as the experiment materials are all English sentences with high accessibility. There is no difficulty for the subjects to make the final judgment of the syntactic correctness, which meets the requirements of the experimental design.
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Chapter Five Conclusion
5.1 Major Findings
In previous studies, scholars have done some researches about the influence of second language proficiency and working memory capacity on the second language learners’ syntactic processing ability. In this study, the author conducted two experiments to examine the influence of second language working memory capacity on the syntactic processing, the influence of second language proficiency on the syntactic processing and the relationship between the working memory capacity and the proficiency.
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