Chinese EFL learners different from English natives in cataphora resolution: Evidence from eye-tracking studies.

ABSTRACT: Previous studies on English natives have shown that encountering an English cataphoric pronoun triggers an active search for its antecedent and this searching process is modulated by syntactic constraints. It remains unknown whether the conclusion is universal to EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners, particularly those with distinct L1 like Chinese in linguistic typology. Therefore, this study used two eye-tracking experiments to investigate how Chinese EFL learners resolve English cataphora. The experiments adopted the gender-mismatch paradigm. Experiment 1 investigated whether Chinese EFL learners with different proficiency would adopt the similar processing pattern to English natives and found that gender congruency elicited longer reading times than gender incongruency between

SUBMITTER: Wang T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9995397 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature