An Eye-tracking Study on Chinese EFL Learners’ Mental Processing of English Neg-Raising Constructions

This study explores the Chinese EFL learners’ mental processing mechanism of English Neg-Raising Constructions with the syntactic mark reading paradigm. 60 Neg-Raising sentences, with different contexts (neutrals, Strong Negative Polarity Items, Verb Phrase Ellipsis) and sentence lengths, were processed to be marked, randomly marked, and unmarked. The eye-tracking data for reading the whole sentences and the area of interest, including total duration of fixations, average duration of fixations, and number of fixations were gathered. According to the data, we can find that the total duration of fixations and average duration of fixations of sentences with syntactic marking are significantly smaller than sentences without syntactic marking. This shows that the syntactic movement marking can improve Chinese EFL learners’ reading comprehension efficiency of NR sentences. In addition, the results show that the total duration of fixations, average duration of fixations and number of fixations of Verb Phrase Ellipsis and Strong Negative Polarity Items are significantly reduced after syntactic marking, indicating that readers need to rely on them to understand and analyze sentences, activate the syntactic movement operation, and complete disambiguation and processing of sentences in the unmarked condition. Moreover, comparing the eye-movement data for the sensitive components in the two contexts, we find that all three eye-movement indicators in the Verb Phrase Ellipsis context are significantly smaller than those in the Strong Negative Polarity Items context, and the changes in the eye-movement indicators in the Verb Phrase Ellipsis context were also smaller than those in the Strong Negative Polarity Items context. Therefore, the dependence on the contextual-sensitive components in Verb Phrase Ellipsis is less than that in Strong Negative Polarity Items, and the influence of the syntactic mark for the latter is greater than the former, indicating that the activation effect of the syntactic mark in the context of Strong Negative Polarity Items is more significant.

本研究旨在探讨中国英语作为外语学习者的英语否定提升结构的心智处理机制，采用句法标记阅读范式。共处理了60个否定提升句子，这些句子具有不同的语境（中性、强否定极性项、动词短语省略）和句子长度，分别进行了标记、随机标记和无标记处理。收集了阅读整个句子及其兴趣区域的注视点数据，包括总注视时间、平均注视时间和注视次数。据数据显示，带有句法标记的句子的总注视时间和平均注视时间显著小于无句法标记的句子。这表明句法移动标记能够提升中国英语作为外语学习者的NR句子阅读理解效率。此外，结果显示，在句法标记后，动词短语省略和强否定极性项的总注视时间、平均注视时间和注视次数均显著减少，这表明读者需要依赖这些结构来理解和分析句子，激活句法移动操作，并在无标记条件下完成歧义消解和句子处理。进一步地，对比两个语境中敏感成分的注视点数据，我们发现动词短语省略语境下的三个注视点指标均显著小于强否定极性项语境下的指标，且动词短语省略语境下的注视点指标变化也小于强否定极性项语境下的变化。因此，读者对动词短语省略语境中语境敏感成分的依赖程度低于强否定极性项，句法标记对后者的作用大于前者，这表明句法标记在强否定极性项语境中的激活效应更为显著。