Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Chinese learners of English are conceptually blind to temporal differences conveyed by tense
T2 - Conceptual tense blindness in late bilinguals
AU - Li, Yang
AU - Casaponsa, Aina
AU - Jones, Manon
AU - Thierry, Guillaume
PY - 2023/5/14
Y1 - 2023/5/14
N2 - Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense, presumably because their native language is tenseless. Here, we show that this difficulty relates to incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing two-event sequences that were either temporally plausible or misaligned according to verb tense (time clash). Behaviourally, both Chinese learners of English and native English controls were able to detect time clashes between events, showing that Chinese participants could apply tense rules explicitly. However, a predicted modulation of the N400 event-related brain potential elicited by time clashes in English controls was entirely absent in Chinese participants. In contrast, the same participants could semantically process time information when it is lexically conveyed in both languages. Thus, despite their mastery of English grammar, high-functioning Chinese learners of English fail to process the meaning of tense-conveyed temporal information in real time.
AB - Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense, presumably because their native language is tenseless. Here, we show that this difficulty relates to incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing two-event sequences that were either temporally plausible or misaligned according to verb tense (time clash). Behaviourally, both Chinese learners of English and native English controls were able to detect time clashes between events, showing that Chinese participants could apply tense rules explicitly. However, a predicted modulation of the N400 event-related brain potential elicited by time clashes in English controls was entirely absent in Chinese participants. In contrast, the same participants could semantically process time information when it is lexically conveyed in both languages. Thus, despite their mastery of English grammar, high-functioning Chinese learners of English fail to process the meaning of tense-conveyed temporal information in real time.
U2 - 10.1111/lang.12584
DO - 10.1111/lang.12584
M3 - Journal article
JO - Language Learning
JF - Language Learning
SN - 0023-8333
ER -