The current study examined whether proficient L2 Chinese speakers can integrate the syntactic status of separable verbs in real-time processing. An offline acceptability judgment task (AJT) and an online self-paced reading task (SPRT) were conducted to examine whether L2 speakers employ structural information or simply rely on lexical storage when processing separable verbs online. In the experiment, the target structures include separable verbs and non-lexical VPs to examine whether the detailed structural processing is operative for both constructions or less operative for the former, involving a lexicon-syntax interface.
Methodology
Each participant completed a self-paced reading and an AJT. After completing the SPRT and the AJT, only L2 participants were further asked to do a proficiency test and a language background survey.
32 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were recruited in Beijing as the control group. All L1 participants were 18 years of age or older. 32 advanced-level L2 learners were also recruited from universities located in Beijing as the experiment group. All L2 participants were L1 Korean speakers enrolled in an undergraduate or graduate program in China at the time of the study. The mean age of the L2 participants was 22.28 (sd = 2.46), and their mean length of residence in the country was 4.87 years (sd = 2.99).
- b.
Proficiency Test
22 L2 participants were certified for HSK 6 (the highest level of the standardized Chinese proficiency test) and 10 participants for HSK 5 (the second highest level of the standardized Chinese proficiency test). In order to confirm L2 participants’ proficiency at the time of the experiment, the present study used a 16-item cloze test, which was used as a placement test by the Chinese language program at a US university in the Midwest. The proficiency test includes sentences with one blank in them. Each question was answered in five multiple choices. The proficiency test was administered using a survey from Qualtrics. The average score of the L2 participants was 13.6 (sd = 1.43) out of 16. 29 participants were considered to have proficiency beyond the highest level offered by the Chinese language program of the US university in the Midwest.
- c.
Materials for the SPRT and AJT
Test materials were designed to examine whether L2 speakers can process the syntactic analysis of separable verbs online. For this purpose, separable verbs and non-lexical VPs were included as test items to confirm whether learners can syntactically analyze both constructions in online and offline conditions. The test items were designed to measure L2 speakers’ ability to analyze the syntactic structure of separable verbs and non-lexical VPs by focusing on their sensitivity to the verb modification rule on these two constructions. Separation by an aspect marker or resultative complement was selected as a means to diagnose L2 syntactic processing in the present study because it is considered the most common pattern used in the phrasal usages of separable verbs (
Siewierska et al. 2010). Since an aspect marker or resultative complement targets a verb in syntax, it was included to test whether participants analyze separable verbs only as words (e.g., *
xizao-
guo shower-EXP ‘have showered’) or reanalyze them into syntactic constructions consisting of a verb and an object (e.g.,
xi-guo-zao wash-EXP-bath ‘to have showered’) during real-time processing. Given this, the L2 syntactic processing in the present study was inferred from whether a parser can demonstrate delayed reading times for incorrect verb modification on separable verbs and non-lexical VPs.
The test items were created with a 2 × 2 design (Condition: SV/VP × Grammar: Grammatical/Ungrammatical). 16 pairs of grammatical and ungrammatical separable verbs and 16 pairs of grammatical and ungrammatical VPs were included as test items. Separable verbs were selected from
A Dictionary of the Usage of Common Chinese Separable Verbs (
Zhou 2011). Furthermore, attempts were made to minimize the number of separable verbs consisting of dummy elements by completely excluding those with a dummy verb. As for the separable verbs with a dummy object, only four of those that are introduced as words in the early stages of L2 Chinese instruction were included in the test item. These items include
pao-bu run-step ‘run’,
shui-jiao sleep-sleep ‘sleep’,
hua-bing slide-ice ‘skate’, and
you-yong swim-swim ‘swim’.
Non-lexical VPs were created with the same length as separable verbs with two monomorphemic words, and it was ensured that they were not listed in Chinese dictionaries to confirm their non-lexicality. The separable verb items and the VP items were controlled in total constituent frequency (constituent 1 + constituent 2), lexical neighbor size (the number of words sharing the same constituents), and stroke number. The constituent frequency was counted from the BCC corpus developed by Beijing Language and Culture University. One-way ANOVA tests revealed that all three factors were controlled across the separable verb and the VP conditions. The information on the test items is presented in
Table 2.
The location of an aspect marker or resultative complement modulated the grammaticality. The same grammatical rules are applied to both separable verbs and non-lexical VPs. While an aspect marker or resultative complement is inserted between two constituent morphemes in the grammatical condition, it is located at the end of a word/phrase in the ungrammatical condition, as in
Table 3a,b.
The region of interest is located in Word 4, and two spillover regions are analyzed in Words 5 and 6. Since syntactically analyzed separable verbs are considered phrases, an aspect marker should be attached to the verbal head morpheme. If attached at the end of the entire construction, this would cause ungrammaticality. The same grammaticality rule applies to the phrase condition. Since VPs are created with two free morphemes (monomorphemic verb + monomorphemic noun), verb modification must take place to the right of the verb. Otherwise, it would cause ungrammaticality. In addition, two aspect markers and two resultative complements (-hao ‘done well’. -wan ‘completely done, -guo ‘experiential aspect’, -zhe ‘progressive aspect’) were used to prevent participants from developing task strategies, and 4 pairs of grammatical and ungrammatical test items were created for each aspect marker/resultative complement across separable verb and phrase conditions. The 64 items (corresponding to 32 grammatical/ungrammatical pairs) were distributed across two lists in a Latin-square design; each list contained 32 target items: 8 grammatical separable verbs, 8 ungrammatical separable verbs, 8 grammatical phrases, and 8 ungrammatical phrases.
There were 96 filler items per list. These included 32 sentences testing negation (16 grammatical, 16 ungrammatical), 32 sentences with relative clauses (16 grammatical, 16 ungrammatical), and 32 items for a different experiment, all of which were grammatical sentences. The same materials were used for the AJT and SPRT, but the sentences were presented as a whole.
- d.
SPRT: Procedures
Participants performed a non-cumulative, self-paced reading task administered by Paradigm Software installed on a personal laptop in a quiet room. Subjects were instructed to read sentences at their own pace on the screen by pressing the spacebar key. Each press of the spacebar key reveals one region of a sentence, and the previous region disappears as the subsequent region becomes visible. After reading each sentence, participants were asked to answer a simple yes/no comprehension question based on the sentence’s content. Before the test session, participants completed a practice session with eight sample items to become familiar with the task format.
- e.
AJT: Procedures
After completing the self-paced reading task, participants were asked to complete an acceptability judgment. The AJT was administered using a survey form on Qualtrics. Ratings were given on a 5-point scale, with 1 indicating ‘totally unacceptable’ and 5 indicating ‘totally acceptable.’ There was no time limit for the AJT, and participants could take as much time as needed to respond. In the AJT, the participants were given the same list of items as in the SPRT.
- f.
Predictions
Chinese native speakers are expected to show sensitivity to ungrammatical verb modification at the end of the entire construction for both separable verbs and non-lexical VPs. In contrast, L2 shallow morphological processing predicts that L2 speakers may not demonstrate native-like sensitivity to incorrect verb modification on separable verbs because it is assumed that the L2 processing system relies heavily on the lexical representations of morphologically complex words. To apply verb modification correctly, a separable verb should be analyzed into a syntactic phrase whose structure is hierarchically deeper than a single lexical item. Yet, since L2 morphological processing prioritizes lexical storage over structural information, L2 speakers are predicted to rely heavily on lexical representations of separable verbs and apply incorrect verb modification at the end of the entire compound during real-time processing.
As for the non-lexical VPs, a possible scenario is that target-like structural processing is operative in L2 for such simple syntactic constructions consisting of two morphemes. Since non-lexical VPs do not have lexical representations, there is less demand for L2 speakers to process syntactic and lexical information in parallel in this case. With sufficient resources available to process the structural information, L2 speakers may be able to build syntactic representations of non-lexical VPs in a native-like manner. Hence, L2 speakers are predicted to display native-like sensitivity to aspect marking violations on non-lexical VPs based on the correct syntactic representations.