Ma Zheng, Wu Shiyu, Xu Shiying
School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China.
School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 Mar 2;12:765777. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.765777. eCollection 2021.
The present study ( = 109) set out to examine the role of cross-linguistic differences as a source of potential difficulty in the acceptance and online interpretation of the English singular by Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners across two levels of second-language proficiency. Experiment 1 operationalized performance through an untimed acceptability judgment test and Experiment 2 through a self-paced reading task. Statistical analyses yielded an asymmetric pattern of results. Experiment 1 indicated that unlike native English speakers who generally accepted the singular with all antecedent types, two Chinese EFL groups consisting of English majors (higher level) and non-English majors (lower level) both rated it as the least acceptable pronoun regardless of their proficiency level. In contrast, Experiment 2 demonstrated that like native English speakers, both Chinese EFL groups were not disrupted in their reading by the use of the singular most of the time, although its online interpretation was modulated by L2 proficiency levels of the participants. While the English majors were not affected by the use of the singular , the non-English majors spent a significantly longer time reading the latter region of the sentences where the singular was used. In short, the results of the two experiments seem to indicate that under no time constraint, L2 speakers showed a heightened degree of grammar sensitivity, whereas when there was a time constraint, their grammatical sensitivity was reduced by a greater need to focus on meaning. The difficulty for Chinese EFL learners to acquire the singular may be located at the restructuring of their existing knowledge of the plural feature of [-PLURAL] in their mental lexicon and the adaptation to the sociocultural norms of the target language. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.
本研究（=109）旨在考察跨语言差异作为一种潜在困难来源，在中国非英语专业的英语学习者接受和即时解读英语单数代词“they”（指代单数先行词）时所起的作用，这些学习者处于两个不同的第二语言水平层次。实验1通过不限时的可接受性判断测试来衡量表现，实验2则通过自定节奏阅读任务来进行。统计分析得出了不对称的结果模式。实验1表明，与通常接受各种先行词类型的单数“they”的英语母语者不同，由英语专业学生（较高水平）和非英语专业学生（较低水平）组成的两组中国非英语专业英语学习者，无论其语言水平如何，都将其评为最不可接受的代词。相比之下，实验2表明，与英语母语者一样，两组中国非英语专业英语学习者在大多数情况下阅读时不会因使用单数“they”而受到干扰，尽管其即时解读会受到参与者第二语言水平的调节。虽然英语专业学生不受使用单数“they”的影响，但非英语专业学生在阅读使用单数“they”的句子后半部分时花费的时间明显更长。简而言之，这两个实验的结果似乎表明，在没有时间限制的情况下，第二语言使用者表现出更高程度的语法敏感性，而当有时间限制时，他们对语法的敏感性会因更需要关注意义而降低。中国非英语专业英语学习者习得单数“they”的困难可能在于他们心理词库中对“they”复数特征[-PLURAL]的现有知识的重构，以及对目标语言社会文化规范的适应。本文讨论了这些研究结果的教学意义。
