Psycholinguistic experiments on sentence production in picture description tasks in L2 English and its skill development

目前的研究考察了二语学习者在开始描述一幅图片之前，对英语句子的规划有多超前。目前的心理语言学实验结果表明，学习者的句子规划范围根据包含双名词的主语短语的类型而变化：协调名词短语（“A和B是……”）。和介词名词短语（“A高于B是……”）。通过这些实验，认识到“认知负荷”在句子规划中的作用。研究表明，不同的认知负荷可能会改变第二语言造句的难易程度。

The present study examined how far ahead L2 learners plan an English sentence before they begin to describe a picture. The results of the present psycholinguistic experiments show that learners' scope of sentence planning varied according to the type of the subject phrase containing double nouns: coordinatd noun phrase ("A and B are ...") and prepositional noun phrase ("A above B is ..."). Through these experiments the role of 'cognitive load' in sentence planning was recognized. It is suggested that varying the cognitive load may change the ease of sentence production in a second language.