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

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.