Chinese ESL Learners' Processing Of Attachment Ambiguity

The goal of sentence processing research is to find out how people rapidly analyze linguistic input to achieve sentence comprehension, which would shed light on the underlying mental mechanism of human being. Much of the research has been done on ambiguous sentence processing in L1, which is claimed to be influenced by a variety of factors including syntactic structure, lexical frequency, discourse context, prosody, and the comprehenders'working memory capacity. Yet little is known about how L2 learners'mental mechanism works in L2 sentence processing.In this context, the present study aims to investigate how Chinese ESL learners process English sentences containing relative clause (RC) with attachment ambiguity, with a focus on the effect of syntactic and lexical factors as well as the influence of working memory capacity on L2 learners'sentence processing. First, 80 non-English major sophomores from a key university in Chengdu participated in the Reading Span Test. 28 of the 80 participants were chosen as subjects of the present study, with their scores for the English final term examination as selection criteria. They were divided into high span and low span groups, with each group including 14 subjects. Then, an off-line questionnaire investigation was carried out to predict the influence of syntactic and lexical factors on the subjects'ambiguity processing in English. Finally, the on-line self-paced reading task was adopted by using the Linger software. The subjects'reaction times at the critical segment were recorded as data. After that, the General Factorial ANOVA was used to analyze the data.The results show that firstly, Chinese ESL learners do not apply the same syntactic parsing principle as native speakers do to English sentence processing; secondly, Chinese ESL learners are not influenced by lexical information to the same extent as native speakers in English sentence processing; thirdly, working memory capacity influences Chinese ESL learners'processing of English sentences. Like native adult speakers, the learners with higher working memory span are able to immediately access and process lexical information to resolve the ambiguity. Whereas learners with lower working memory span tend to prefer the local attachment, implying that they adopt the Late Closure Principle to solve RC attachment ambiguity as English monolingual young children do.According to the results, we get the following conclusions: Generally, L2 learners'mental mechanism underlying the target language processing is different from that of L1 adult speakers. But the processing difference between the subjects with high working memory span and those with low working memory span implies that some individuals might behave similarly as native speakers during sentence processing in L2.