1. Introduction

This article explores the characteristics of Chinese college students' preference for the placement of time adverbial clauses in English, and points out that Chinese students tend to prefer prepositional time adverbial clauses, which is inconsistent with the habit of native English speakers who prioritize postposition. The study is based on a dependency syntactic annotation corpus and uses dependency distance as a metric to explore the impact of syntactic processing difficulty on the position selection of time adverbial clauses by Chinese students and native English speakers, in order to gain a deeper understanding of learners' position preferences from a language processing perspective.

2. Literature review

In depth exploration was conducted on various factors that affect Chinese students' preference for the position of time adverbial clauses in English, including iconicity, syntactic analysis, semantics, and pragmatics. Research suggests that Chinese students tend to place time adverbial clauses before the main clause, which may be related to mother tongue transfer. Scholars have found that the distribution of temporal adverbial clauses is related to learners' understanding of the semantic types of conjunctions and their discourse functions by comparing learners, English, and Chinese corpora. In addition, the study also found that the principle of chronological similarity is followed to a certain extent by both native English speakers and learners.

3. Research Design

Introduced the research design, including corpus sources, research steps, and corpus sampling. The study is based on a corpus of Chinese college students' English compositions, consisting of 400 essays with a total of 86800 words, and students' English proficiency levels are B1 to B2. The essay topic is provided by the researcher and is limited to the genre of narrative writing. The English native language corpus comes from four types of novels in the LOB corpus. The research steps include determining the target conjunctions (when, after, before, once, until), using semi-automatic annotation methods to annotate dependency syntactic relationships and assign part of speech codes to the corpus, and manually checking and retrieving the dependency relationships between the target conjunctions and adverbial clauses. 524 temporal adverbial clauses were retrieved from the self built corpus, and the same number of clauses were randomly selected from the LOB corpus for comparison.

4. Research results

Through statistical analysis, it was found that Chinese students tend to use prepositional clauses in English time adverbs, while native English speakers tend to use postpositional clauses. The proportion of prepositional clauses among Chinese students is 70.42%, and the proportion of postpositive clauses is 29.58%, which shows a significant difference compared to native speakers. There is a significant difference in MDD between pre - and post clauses among Chinese students, indicating that the processing difficulty of different positions affects their distribution. There are significant differences in the difficulty of pre - and post processing between Chinese students and native speakers in when clauses with different types of conjunctions. Chinese students tend to place the 'when' clause before the main clause events, regardless of their chronological order, while native speakers choose the position of the clause based on the order of events. Logistic regression analysis shows that both dependency distance and temporal order similarity have an impact on the position selection of temporal adverbial clauses by Chinese students and native speakers, with dependency distance being the key factor leading to differences in position distribution.

5. Discussion

Chinese students tend to prefer prepositioning in the distribution of time adverbial clauses in English, which differs significantly from native speakers and may be related to mother tongue transfer and concept transfer. Research has found that Chinese students have lower difficulty in processing prepositional clauses than postpositive clauses, while there is no significant difference among native speakers. As an indicator of working memory load, Chinese students tend to use prepositional clauses with shorter dependency distances to alleviate the burden of working memory. Compared to native speakers, Chinese students have a greater cognitive load in language processing, resulting in a higher consumption of working memory capacity. In addition, Chinese students follow the principle of temporal sequence similarity in the distribution of temporal adverbial clauses with different types of conjunctions. However, when the syntactic processing difficulty is high, they will choose to place the when clause before it to reduce the difficulty of sentence processing. Native speakers, on the other hand, are not affected by syntactic processing difficulty and tend to follow the principle of temporal sequence similarity.

6. Conclusion

We constructed a corpus of English dependency syntax annotations for Chinese university students and native speakers, and studied the relationship between temporal adverbial clause position preference and syntactic processing difficulty. Chinese students tend to prefer prepositional adverbial clauses with lower difficulty in processing prepositional syntax. The working memory capacity and syntactic differences between English and Chinese limit the syntactic processing of Chinese students. The post MDD of time adverbial clauses with different types of conjunctions is greater than the pre MDD. There is no significant difference in MDD between when and after clauses among native speakers. The difficulty of syntactic processing and the similarity in chronological order affect the distribution of when clause positions among Chinese students. The study reveals the laws of second language acquisition and cognition, and suggests emphasizing the differences between mother tongue and target language in foreign language teaching to reduce learners' cognitive burden. Future research can comprehensively analyze the language acquisition process by combining language proficiency and individual differences among learners.