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To investigate the grammatical constraints of code-switching (CS hereafter) under the disputes of the constraint-based account versus the constraint-free account, the effects of functional category on CS have long been investigated in the existing studies. Thus, the present study, by asking 47 participants to take part in an eye-movement experiment, examined the potential effects of functional category on Chinese-English CS. We found that differential switch costs at varying code-switched conditions as well as robust switch effects that last from the early to the late stage. The findings could tentatively give rise to the theoretical predictions of the minimalist program, a representative of the constraint-free account rather than the functional head constraint, a typical representative of the constraint-based account. Moreover, such switch effects might initiate from the early to the very late stage in terms of time-course of CS processing.

Abstract-Language transfer is a bidirectional phenomenon, which includes not only forward transfer but also backward transfer. Recently, backward transfer, also seeing as effects of L2 on the L1, has gaining attention in the field of SLA. Taking tag questions as an example, current study aims to enrich backward transfer study with a tentative research on the influence of English (L2) knowledge on Chinese (L1) in the light of Multi-competence Theory from SLA perspective. A questionnaire with assurance-doubt task (40 items) is made and 101 university students are recruited to fill it out. The data are analyzed by SPSS 18.0. Results proved the influence of English knowledge on that of Chinese at semantic level. Besides, the improvement in metalinguistic awareness is found in English major students.

It has long been considered that the Mandarin possessive reflexive zijide can be either locally bound or long distance bound, leading to ambiguity where it fails to exclusively refer back to either long distance binding NP or the local NP. In addition to syntactic factors such as the local versus long distance division, the present study examined the potential influence of general world knowledge on the interpretation of zijide. Three experiments, two offline sentence evaluation tasks and one online sentence reading task, found that zijide could be either facilitated or impeded by world knowledge carried in the NPs of the sentence. The results showed that in some cases, zijide was considered exclusively referring back to the long distance NP. These findings seemed to support the notion of subject orientation effect and demonstrated the influence of world knowledge on the processing of Mandarin possessive reflexive zijide.

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