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 Gali, Aina

AU - Jones, Manon

AU - Thierry, Guillaume

N1 - Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange. Grant Number: PPN/PRO/2020/1/00006

PY - 2024/3

Y1 - 2024/3

N2 - Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense presumably because their native language is tenseless. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their 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). Both upper-intermediate Chinese learners of English and native English speakers 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-speaking participants was entirely absent in Chinese participants. In contrast, the same Chinese participants could semantically process time information when it was lexically conveyed in both languages. Thus, despite their mastery of English grammar, high-functioning Chinese learners of English failed 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. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their 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). Both upper-intermediate Chinese learners of English and native English speakers 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-speaking participants was entirely absent in Chinese participants. In contrast, the same Chinese participants could semantically process time information when it was lexically conveyed in both languages. Thus, despite their mastery of English grammar, high-functioning Chinese learners of English failed to process the meaning of tense- conveyed temporal information in real time.

KW - grammatical tense

KW - bilingualistm

KW - semantics

KW - event-related brain potentials

KW - proficiency

KW - N400

U2 - 10.1111/lang.12584

DO - 10.1111/lang.12584

M3 - Article

VL - 74

SP - 184

EP - 217

JO - Brain and Language

JF - Brain and Language

SN - 0093-934X

IS - 1

ER -