An Event-Related Potentials Study on the Syntactic Transfer Effect of Late Language Learners

Taiping Deng; Dongping Deng; Qing Feng

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.777225

An Event-Related Potentials Study on the Syntactic Transfer Effect of Late Language Learners

Front Psychol. 2022 Jan 3:12:777225. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.777225. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Taiping Deng¹, Dongping Deng², Qing Feng³

Affiliations

¹ School of Marxism Studies, Zhejiang University of Finance and Economics, Hangzhou, China.
² No. 3 Middle School of Gan County, Ganzhou, China.
³ College of Education, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, China.

Abstract

This study explored the syntactic transfer effect of the non-local subject-verb agreement structure with plural head noun after two intensive phases of input training with event-related potentials (ERP). The non-local subject-verb agreement stimuli with the plural head nouns, which never appeared in training phases, were used for the stimuli. A total of 26 late L1-Chinese L2-English learners, who began to learn English after a critical period and participated in our previous experiments, were asked back to take part in this syntactic transfer experiment. Results indicated that a significant ERP component P600 occurred in the key region (the verb) of the sentences with syntactic violations in the experimental group, but none occurred in the control group. This demonstrated that there was a significant transfer effect of the input training. The possible theoretical explanation was provided and also the malleability of the late L2 learners was discussed.

Keywords: P600; input training; malleability; syntactic representation; transfer effect.