The effects of sentence structure parallelism, grammatical role, and working memory on pronoun anaphora resolution in Chinese-English bilinguals
Xin CHANG
Luyue Cheng- 1Tongji University, China
- 2Shanghai Normal University, China
This study explored the effects of pronoun grammatical roles, sentence structural parallelism and working memory on English pronoun anaphora resolution strategies by observing the judgments of Chinese-English learners with high or low reading spans. The results show that Chinese-English learners prefer to use the parallel function strategy in anaphora resolution, and the subject-first strategy only promotes the disambiguation of subject pronouns under the parallel structure. The processing speed of pronouns in parallel sentence structures is faster than that in non-parallel sentence structures. Despite the overwhelming advantage of the strategy of structural parallelism, the grammatical role still plays a moderating role: the response time of subject pronoun judgment is significantly shorter than that of object pronoun judgment under the structure parallelism. Regardless of whether the antecedent role is subject or object, the response time of the high reading span group was significantly shorter than that of the low span group, and the pronoun was more likely to be assigned to the subject of the sentence. This suggests that pronoun anaphoric resolution is influenced by the interaction between linguistic and cognitive factors. Therefore, in the course of second language learning and teaching for Chinese-English bilinguals, it is necessary to emphasize the role of sentence structure and grammatical roles in pronoun resolution and strengthen the training of working memory.
Keywords: pronoun, anaphora resolution, grammatical role, structure parallel, working memory
Received: 03 Mar 2023;
Accepted: 14 Aug 2023.
Copyright: © 2023 CHANG, Cheng and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Mx. Xin CHANG, Tongji University, Shanghai, China