An ERP Study on Internalizing English Parsing Strategies of EFL Learners through Incorporating Play Cards

Abstract

his study explores the possibility that EFL learners can efficiently internalize and operate English syntactic structures in Computational Process with the Incorporating Play Card (IPC) game applying Parsing Strategies to the game rules. To proceed this, not only was the pre-experiment conducted before using the IPC but also the post experiment was carried out with the visualized model of Parsing Strategies implemented into the IPC. It was based on the principles, Human Sentence Processing Mechanism (HSPM) and the Universal Principles (UP). According to the results of the experiments, in the case that EFL learners face the syntactic ambiguity, it can be posited that they might operate the parsing strategies under the UPs. This study, unlike the previous studies focusing on L1 parsing strategies for resolving the syntactic ambiguity, will focus on the parsing strategies which EFL learners use. For the experiments, we first developed the IPC and offered the EFL learners the circumstances for provoking the parser. The Event Related Potential (ERP) components of the participants were reviewed at the beginning of the experiments and were measured after the 30 week IPC game. The results of pre-experiments to post comparison will be explained with ERP components concerning whether the target parsing strategies could be internalized through the IPC teaching method and what factors might operate in the course of internalization.