Is Second Language Learners' Comprehension Of Garden Path Sentences "Good Enough"?

Garden path (GP) sentence comprehension has long been studied by linguists and psycholinguists due to its special local ambiguity of the sentence. Traditional theories believe that GP sentence comprehension generates a complete and accurate representation of the linguistic input if the ambiguity is resolved. However, recent findings challenge this assumption. In a series of experiments, Christianson and his colleagues found that the final representation of GP sentence comprehension is not always a reflection of its true content. The initial, illicit interpretation lingers and affects the final representation of the GP sentence even after syntactic reanalysis has taken place. They named such a representation"good enough"(GE) representation and the process is accordingly GE processing. The generation of GE representation is believed to be related to computational resource limitation or heavy computational demands. On account of the extra computational load caused by limited language proficiency, L2 GP sentence comprehension will be terminated with a GE interpretation in a more pronounced way. In addition, working memory (WM) capacity and L2 proficiency are believed to contribute a lot to the generation of GE interpretations. But in studies to date, their roles in GP comprehension are still rather inconclusive. That is what we research into in this study. By investigating the interpretations of GP sentences, we investigated Chinese EFL speakers'GP sentence comprehension with a probe into the role of WM capacity and L2 proficiency. The research questions are:1) Is L2 learners'final representation in garden path sentence comprehension"good enough"?2) Does working memory capacity correlate with the final representation in L2 garden path sentence comprehension?3) Does language proficiency correlate with the final representation in L2 garden path sentence comprehension?We conducted a GP sentence comprehension test, a WM capacity test, and a language proficiency test. The findings are as follows:1) There are GE representations in L2 GP sentence comprehension.2) Although positively correlated with the resolution of GP ambiguity, WM capacity does not significantly correlate with the generation of GE representations in L2 GP sentence comprehension.3) Although positively correlated with the resolution of GP ambiguity, L2 proficiency does not significantly correlate with the generation of GE representations in L2 GP sentence comprehension.We attribute these findings to factors like WM testing material in L1, intermediate language proficiency and lack of meta-linguistic awareness and skills. Future studies with subjects with diversified language proficiency and materials on a wider range of sentence structures are suggested to explore the particular causes of GE comprehension in L2 context.