Doctoral dissertation research: The Effects of Syntactic Complexity on Native and Nonnative Agreement Processing: An Event-Related Potentials Investigation

世界上许多语言都表现出某种语法上的一致性，一个语言组成部分的语法特征在另一个相关组成部分上是可见的。最近的心理语言学研究发现了一些影响我们在语言产生过程中如何计算一致性的语义和句法因素，尽管对这些因素在语言理解过程中如何相互作用知之甚少。理解一致的处理过程在第二语言习得领域也至关重要，因为我们经常观察到，第二语言学习者在语法一致方面表现出相当大的困难，尽管他们在第二语言环境中接受了多年的正式语言教学和沉浸。许多二语习得学者提出二语学习者的一致性问题是加工问题的结果，但很少有研究直接对此进行调查。本论文研究项目探讨了英语母语者和来自不同语言背景的高级第二语言英语学习者在实时句子理解过程中如何计算主谓一致性，特别关注句子的句法复杂性如何影响协议处理。本实验使用语法一致现象来进一步研究最近的假设，即第二语言学习者无法获得非母语语法对比，第二语言学习者的语言处理系统与母语系统截然不同。这些问题将在参与者阅读英语句子时通过记录事件相关脑电位（ERPs）来解决。erp已被证明对母语协议处理的许多方面高度敏感，尽管没有研究调查语法复杂性如何影响协议计算。此外，erp最近才被用于研究第二语言处理。因此，关于第二语言协议处理的神经基础或协议、语法和第一语言经验在第二语言处理过程中如何相互作用的知识缺乏。因此，将现代心理语言学和神经生理学技术纳入二语习得和加工研究将补充现有丰富的二语语法表征理论语言学文献。这项研究的结果将引起对语言感兴趣的认知神经科学家，以及研究一致性，其与句法结构的关系以及一致性如何与句法分析系统相互作用的理论语言学家和心理语言学家的兴趣。研究结果将引起理论和应用二语习得研究者的兴趣，对语言习得理论和语言教育学具有潜在的重要意义。

Many languages of the world show grammatical agreement of some sort, where the grammatical features of a linguistic constituent are visible on another associated constituent. Recent psycholinguistic research has uncovered a number of semantic and syntactic factors that influence how we compute agreement during language production, though much less is known about how these factors interact during language comprehension. Understanding the processing of agreement is also of critical importance in the field of second language acquisition (SLA), as it is frequently observed that second language (L2) learners show considerable trouble with grammatical agreement, often despite many years of formal language instruction and immersion in an L2 environment. Many SLA scholars have proposed that L2 learners' problems with agreement are the result of processing problems, though little research has directly investigated this.This dissertation research project investigates how subject-verb agreement is computed during real-time sentence comprehension by native speakers of English and by advanced second language learners of English from different linguistic backgrounds, specifically focusing on how a sentence's syntactic complexity influences agreement processing. The experiment uses grammatical agreement phenomena to additionally investigate recent hypotheses that nonnative grammatical contrasts are unacquirable by L2 learners and that L2 learners' language processing systems are radically different from native language systems. These questions will be addressed by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while participants read sentences in English. ERPs have been shown to be highly sensitive to many facets of native language agreement processing, though no studies have investigated how syntactic complexity affects agreement computation. Additionally, ERPs have only recently been used to study L2 processing. There is thus a paucity of knowledge about the neural substrates underlying L2 agreement processing or how agreement, syntax, and L1 experience interact during L2 processing. The inclusion of modern psycholinguistic and neurophysiological techniques in studying L2 acquisition and processing will therefore complement the existing rich theoretical linguistic literature on L2 grammatical representation. The outcomes of this research will be of interest to cognitive neuroscientists interested in language and to theoretical linguists and psycholinguists studying agreement, its relationship to syntactic structure, and how agreement interacts with syntactic parsing systems. The results will additionally be of interest to theoretical and applied SLA researchers, having potentially significant implications for language acquisition theory and language pedagogy.