Chinese Learners of English Are Conceptually Blind to Temporal Differences Conveyed by Tense

Abstract

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.

An Introduction to the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Embodiment and Relativity Special Issue of the Language Learning Cognitive Neuroscience Series

“…r What if, on the contrary, the lack of a particular word or grammatical feature in the native language meant that a speaker of that language could not readily conceptualize a particular abstract object or situation in the same way as speakers of another language that has the word or feature in question (see, for instance, Li et al, 2018Li et al, , 2023, for the case of grammatical tense and Chinese)?…”

“…Here are some questions that researchers might want to consider addressing in future studies: What if words that sound or look similar carried such formal overlap over to the conceptual domain, linking together the concepts they convey, a kind of hyper‐Whorfian effect? What if the particular words that an individual chooses to describe more or less complex objects and situations made that individual more or less able to perceive them, recognize them, categorize them, and manipulate them? What if, on the contrary, the lack of a particular word or grammatical feature in the native language meant that a speaker of that language could not readily conceptualize a particular abstract object or situation in the same way as speakers of another language that has the word or feature in question (see, for instance, Li et al., 2018, 2023, for the case of grammatical tense and Chinese)? What if verbal and nonverbal conceptual representations implemented by neural networks in the human brain interacted with the networks in charge of early stages of perception to a much greater extent than scholars have been able to understand? What if language did more than superficially orient attention to features of the world and also contributed to unconsciously shaping human behavior? …”