Exploring the effects of animacy and verb type on the processing asymmetry between SRC and ORC among Chinese EFL learners
Li Sun,
Lin Fan and
Mengling Xu ()
Additional contact information
Li Sun: Qingdao University of Science and Technology
Lin Fan: Beijing Foreign Studies University
Mengling Xu: Huzhou University
Palgrave Communications, 2023, vol. 10, issue 1, 1-10
Abstract:
Abstract This study investigates the production and comprehension of subject relative clause (SRC) and object relative clause (ORC) in English by Chinese EFL learners. Two experiments are reported. Using a sentence completion task to elicit the production of relative clauses (RCs), Experiment 1 examined the distributional patterns of SRC and ORC and showed that SRC was more frequently distributed than ORC. In addition, animacy and verb type had effects on the asymmetric distribution of SRC and ORC. Using a word-by-word moving-window self-paced reading paradigm, Experiment 2 further compared reading times (RTs) of SRC and ORC containing different animacy and verb type configurations. Reading difficulties in ORC were observed, and comprehension difficulties of certain configurations of animacy and verb type just mirrored their frequencies in the first experiment. Taken together, the processing asymmetry of SRC and ORC has been observed in both comprehension and production processes. Comprehension difficulties are believed to stem from the asymmetric distributions of sentence patterns involving different animacy and verb type configurations. These findings suggest that comprehension difficulties are correlated with the distributional patterns, which could provide strong support to the Production-Distribution-Comprehension account, the experience-based approach applicable in language acquisition.
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41599-023-01647-5 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palcom:v:10:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1057_s41599-023-01647-5
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/palcomms/about
DOI: 10.1057/s41599-023-01647-5
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Palgrave Communications from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().