Grammaticality judgment of Chinese and English sentences by native speakers of alphasyllabary: A reaction time study

A group of 118 sixteen-year-old students of ethnic Indian and Pakistani origin, learning school Chinese, judged on-line the grammaticality of 18 pairs of sentences in Chinese and English. We hypothesized: (a) The students might not perform worse in simple Chinese sentence processing as compared with equivalent English sentences. (b) There would be an overall school effect as proxy for learning experience. (c) Grammatically correct sentences would be processed more efficiently than anomalous ones. MANCOVA (age as covariate) and efficiency indices, by taking into account both accuracy and reaction time, support the hypotheses. The results are discussed in learning form and meaning of school Chinese.