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一致性，即一个语言成分的语法特征在另一个相关成分上是可见的。最近的心理语言学研究已经发现了一些语义和句法因素，影响我们如何计算协议在语言生产，虽然少得多的是知道这些因素如何在语言理解过程中相互作用。理解一致性的处理在第二语言习得领域也是至关重要的，因为经常观察到第二语言学习者在语法一致性方面表现出相当大的困难，尽管他们经常接受多年的正式语言教学并沉浸在第二语言环境中。许多二语习得学者认为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探讨。本论文研究了英语本族语者和来自不同语言背景的高级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一致性处理。实验使用语法一致现象，另外调查最近的假设，非母语语法对比是不可习得的L2学习者和L2学习者的语言处理系统是从根本上不同于母语系统。这些问题将通过记录事件相关脑电位（ERP）来解决，同时参与者阅读英语句子。ERP已经被证明是高度敏感的母语协议处理的许多方面，虽然没有研究调查句法复杂性如何影响协议计算。此外，ERP最近才被用于研究L2处理。因此，有一个知识匮乏的神经基板的L2协议处理或协议，语法和L1经验如何在L2处理过程中相互作用。因此，将现代心理语言学和神经生理学技术纳入到二语习得和加工的研究中，将补充现有的关于二语语法表征的丰富的理论语言学文献。这项研究的结果将感兴趣的认知神经科学家感兴趣的语言和理论语言学家和心理语言学家研究协议，其关系的句法结构，以及协议如何与句法分析系统相互作用。研究结果也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学法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.