Comprehension Of English Local Syntactic Ambiguity

The phenomenon of English local syntactic ambiguities has been the research focus for many years. Recently, with technological progress, the research in this area is even more extensive and profound, and emerging theories compete with each other in an unprecedented way. While"local syntactic ambiguities"is a scarcely explored area for most Chinese scholars, and there is much to be desired in the research on Chinese EFL learners'comprehension towards local syntactic ambiguities. This paper makes attempts to evaluate, compare and summarize various theories in the field of local syntactic ambiguities. It makes special efforts to discuss some Chinese EFL learners'comprehension towards local syntactic ambiguities. The selected Chinese EFL learners participated in both off-line and on-line experiments.The research in the paper was carried out mainly from two perspectives: parsing strategies and individual differences. Two aspects of individual differences discussed in the paper concerning the comprehension of local syntactic ambiguities were: working memory and language proficiency. Creatively, the author proposed two important meta-cognitive strategies on the basis of relevant theories: the inhibition-based strategy and the mixture of top-down and bottom-up strategy. The final representation of dealing with local syntactic ambiguity is another research focus. The author introduced a new breakthrough in the representations of comprehending local ambiguities, i.e. the"good enough"(GE) approach of Ferreira et al. (2002). It further discussed Chinese EFL learners'final representations through an online reading experiment to testify the GE approach. Besides, it was found that some basic assumptions of the GE approach were compatible with those of the working memory concept. And the GE approach rendered us some new orientations for the research on local syntactic ambiguities.Through the experiments in the paper, it could be concluded that Chinese EFL learners'knowledge towards local syntactic ambiguities is scarce, and their understanding is less than satisfactory. What is in the way is not their vocabulary range or basic grammar knowledge, but rather their low-level awareness or unfamiliarity with local syntactic ambiguities. Naturally, the most important implication drawn from the paper is that: For Chinese EFL learners, metacognitive strategies need to be cultivated systematically to enhance their reading comprehension, especially their comprehension of local syntactic ambiguities.