Input-based structure-specific proficiency predicts the neural mechanism of adult L2 syntactic processing

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

“…Transfer is thought of as a ubiquitous, continuous, systematic use of selected parts of the immense body of prior knowledge, and it means the use of previously acquired knowledge or skills in new learning or problem-solving situations (Steiner, 2001). As the materials of the present study were quite similar to those of Deng et al (2015), the only differences were the singular or plural head noun and their corresponding predicate.…”

“…Due to insufficient input with the specific subject-verb agreement structure, participants of both the EG and CG showed no sensibility to violations of this structure in the pretest of Deng et al (2015). Two intensive training sessions with specific subject-verb agreement structures made participants in the experimental group relatively proficient with this specific structure (White et al, 2012) and thus made its corresponding representations entrenched (Bybee, 2006).…”

“…The results showed that, at the high proficiency phase after input training, the implicit training group showed native-like processing paradigm with an anterior positivity followed by P600 component, which indicated the important role of the input and input type in syntactic acquisition. Deng et al (2015) provided the electrophysiological evidence that input was a very important factor. A pretest-training-posttest paradigm was adopted to investigate the effect of input training.…”

“…The subject-verb agreement structure in English includes several expressions as local "The boy usually goes to school by bus, " non-local as "The price of the cars was very high, " etc. Though the experimental group in the study of Deng et al (2015) showed sensitivity to the syntactic violations after two sessions of training, it is still unknown whether this specific input training with singular head noun could be transferred to the same subject-verb agreement structure but in different expressions. Therefore, the present study aimed to take a small step in exploring transfer effect in late English learners.…”

“…For example, "The girls of the family were (was) very beautiful and polite." That structure of Deng et al (2015) included a single countable noun modified by a prepositional phrase (PP), the verb "was" or "were" as the predicate that either agreed or disagreed with the singular subject noun in number, and other sentence constituents. For example, "The price of the car was (were) very high."…”