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haviorally, which entails the usage oflinguistic structures and knowledge. This thesis is concerned about this aspect and makes it theyard stick against which the subjects’ comprehension was tested and measured, by examiningwhether the subjects could recognize the agents in a series of both active and passive sentences.This type of task has been used in several previous studies of sentence comprehension, such asFerreira (2003) who tested comprehension of cleft and passive sentences, and D browska andStreet (2006) who examined how the natives and non-natives comprehended the plausible andimplausible passive sentences. The result of such a task is “a measure of some aspects of thesemantic representation constructed for a sentence, as well as its stability”(Ferreira, 2003: 166)and can provide certain information about the meaning people derive for the sentence. Theplausibility was also manipulated just like in D browska and Street’s (2006) and Ferreira’s (2003)studies. Thus, the participants were tested on four different kinds of sentences: plausible actives,implausible actives, plausible passives, and implausible passives.

Chapter Two literature review

Chapter Two provides the overall literature review for the current study. Previous studiesboth at home and abroad on sentence comprehension, comprehension of English passivesentences and second language proficiency are introduced and explained in details.

2.1 Previous Studies on Sentence Comprehension
Domestic and overseas scholars have done a lot of researches in sentence comprehensionwhich mainly fall into 3 categories.The first category belongs to the study on sentence processing. In China, some scholarsstudied the nature of comprehension from the view of cognitive science (Yuan & Li, 2007).Some scholars addressed the issue of sentence processing model, finding that the syntax andsemantics interact with each other to yield the correct interpretations of the sentence, with thesyntax the dominant factor and the semantics the second (Peng & Liu, 1993). Some otherscholars focused on the comprehension of different sentences by different people. Xu (1990)examined the development of comprehension of double negation and quantified negation by 166children from 4 – 13 years old, showing that children aged 5 could comprehend basic doublenegation, and the sequence of understanding different type of quantified negation and doublenegation could be predicted fairly well by analysis of the syntactic and semantic complexity ofthem. Miao and Sang (1992) explored the comprehension of affirmative, negative and doublenegative sentences with quantifiers by asking 20 adults to match the sentence and picture quickly.The results showed that the discrepancy between surface structure and underlying meaning, thediscrepancy between underlying meaning and the proposition, and the quantifiers are significantdeterminants in sentence comprehension.

Chapter Three Research Methodology ...........29-31
    3.1 Subjects ..........29
    3.2 Materials.......... 29-30
    3.3 Procedur.......... 30
    3.4 Design.......... 30-31
Chapter Four Results and Discussion.......... 31-50
    4.1 Between-Subject Comparisons.......... 32-42
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