CHAPTER ONEGENERAL INTRODUCTION
1.1 Overview
This chapter starts with the aim of the present study. Then rationale and significancefor the present study are discussed and research questions are put forward. Finally, itends with an illustration of the organization of the thesis.
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1.2 Aim of the present study
The present study, through manipulating the frequency of the verb (high-frequency vs.low-frequency) and sentence type (subject-extracted cleft sentences vs. object-extracted cleft sentences), explores the temporal dynamics of lexical access andsyntactic integration during online cleft sentence comprehension by Chinese EFLlearners of different proficiency levels. This is an attempt to understand how verbfrequency and syntactic structure interact with each other during online sentenceprocessing.
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1.3 Rationale for the present study
In native language (L1) online relative clause (RC) and cleft sentence processing,there is a well-studied asymmetry between the processing of subject-extracted andobject-extracted sentences. It has been shown that subject relative clauses (SRs) andsubject-extracted cleft sentences (SCs) will lead to faster reading times around theverb (the cleft region in cleft sentences) than their object-extracted counterparts,namely object relative clauses (ORs) and object-extracted cleft sentences (OCs)(Wanner & Maratsos 1978, King & Just 1991, Traxler, Morris & Seely 2017, Traxler,Williams, Blozis & Morris 2017).Empirical studies demonstrated that native speaker can employ bothlexical-semantic information and structural information during online sentenceprocessing. The subject processing preference of native speakers can be modulated bylexical and semantic information of the words in the sentences, which include thethematic role assignment (Kutas & King 1996), the relative frequency ofco-occurrence (Mac Donald, Pearlmutter & Seidenberg 1994), animacy relations of thenoun phrases (NPs) (Traxler, Morris, & Seely 2017; Traxler, Williams, Blozis &Morris 2017), givenness hierarchy of the NPs (Reali & Christiansen 2017; Warren &Gibson 2017), similarity of the NPs (Gordon, Hendrick & Johnson 2017), ect.Studies on L2 sentence processing mainly focus on the question of whether themental representations and processing mechanisms of L2 learners are the same withnative speakers. There is still no consensus with regard to whether L2 learners canemploy syntactic information as efficiently as native speakers do. RC and cleftsentence processing in L2 indicated that high proficient L2 learners generally show apreference for SRs and SCs over ORs and OCs as the native speakers do in terms ofboth accuracy of sentence comprehension and speed of online processing (Bao Gui2017, Hashimoto 2017, Hashimoto 2017, Izumi 2017, Omaki & Ariji 2017). Besides,animacy of the NPs, demands in lexical recognition, L2 proficiency, L1 backgroundhave shown to influence L2 learners’ sensitivity to the SR-OR asymmetry duringonline sentence processing.
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CHAPTER TWOLITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Overview
This chapter first introduces the definition of cleft sentences and their classifications.Besides, the structure similarity of clauses in it-clefts and restrictive RCs are alsopointed out. After that it reviews studies of L1 online processing of English cleftsentences, particula，英语毕业论文，英语毕业论文 |
