Attachment Ambiguity Resolution In Sentence Comprehension And Its Implications For Teaching

Language understanding has intrigued many scholars from various disciplines and schools, who have been trying to uncover human's mental mechanisms underlying it. Language understanding can be composed of understanding at different language levels. This thesis mainly deals with language understanding at the sentence-level, i.e. sentence comprehension.As an interesting linguistic phenomenon, ambiguity is everywhere in human beings' natural language, which is a unique feature that distinguishes natural language from artificial language. The study of ambiguity and its resolution will surely help researchers to take a further step towards understanding sentence comprehension.The ubiquity of ambiguity in natural language, on one hand, enables the researchers to have abundant material for studying, and on the other hand, makes the defining of ambiguity a challenging job to complete. There is, so far, no consensus achieved as to the definition of ambiguity. This thesis addresses the two main types of ambiguity, namely, the lexical ambiguity and the structural ambiguity, with the primary focus on one type of structural ambiguity - the attachment ambiguity.This thesis adopts theories and approaches of cognitive psychology to guide the exploration into the attachment ambiguity and its resolution, which will not only help further the understanding of sentence comprehension, but also can provide beneficial implications for language teaching.