Yan Shanshan, Mai Ziyin, Zhao Yang
School of Chinese as a Second Language, Peking University, Beijing, China.
Department of Linguistics and Translation, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China.
Front Psychol. 2023 Jul 25;14:1145493. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1145493. eCollection 2023.
This study investigates the representation and processing of written Chinese sentences subject to a semantic condition (i.e., "direction of change") attached to the sentence-final particle (SFP) in Mandarin Chinese. Three groups of bilingual speakers of Chinese and English who differ in their onset age of bilingualism and proficiency of English were studied. It was anticipated that there would be a positive cross-linguistic influence (CLI) from English due to similarities between the SFP and the English adverb in terms of direct semantic transfer. An acceptability judgment (AJ) task and a self-paced reading (SPR) task were conducted to elicit judgment and processing difficulty with and without semantic violations. The participants included English-dominant second language (L2) learners ( = 18) and heritage learners ( = 19) who had advanced proficiency in Chinese, as well as monolingually raised Mandarin speakers from China as a baseline control group ( = 18). The results indicated that sensitivity to violations of the semantic condition varied depending on factors such as the specific structure (noun vs. verb phrase), the task type (offline vs. online), and the type of bilingual speaker (early vs. late). Among the three groups of bilinguals, the heritage learners demonstrated a representation of the semantic condition that resembled the target language across different sentence structures, whereas the L2 learners did not. Furthermore, the heritage learners exhibited earlier sensitivity to violations during online processing compared to the baseline control group. These exceptional results can be attributed to the heritage learners' early exposure to and positive CLI between the SFP in Mandarin and the English adverb .
本研究调查了汉语普通话中句末语气词附带语义条件（即“变化方向”）时书面汉语句子的表征与加工情况。研究了三组汉语和英语双语者，他们在双语起始年龄和英语熟练程度上存在差异。由于句末语气词与英语副词在直接语义转移方面存在相似性，预计会有来自英语的正向跨语言影响（CLI）。进行了可接受性判断（AJ）任务和自定步速阅读（SPR）任务，以引出有无语义违反情况下的判断和加工难度。参与者包括以英语为主的第二语言（L2）学习者（n = 18）和汉语水平较高的传承学习者（n = 19），以及来自中国的单语普通话使用者作为基线对照组（n = 18）。结果表明，对语义条件违反的敏感度因具体结构（名词与动词短语）、任务类型（离线与在线）以及双语者类型（早期与晚期）等因素而异。在三组双语者中，传承学习者在不同句子结构中表现出与目标语言相似的语义条件表征，而L2学习者则没有。此外，与基线对照组相比，传承学习者在在线加工过程中对违反情况表现出更早的敏感度。这些特殊结果可归因于传承学习者早期接触普通话中的句末语气词以及它与英语副词之间的正向跨语言影响。
