A Study On Second Language Learners’ Comprehension Of English Garden Path Sentences

Garden path sentences (GP) are a complicated and interesting phenomenon in theprocess of language comprehension. The GP sentences have always been paid more attentionto by linguists and psycholinguists since they were found by the American psycholinguistBever in1970. The research of the garden path sentences contributes to finding out theworking mechanism of the human brains in the process of language processing. For40years,linguists have proposed different syntactic processing strategies and models to explain thecomprehension of garden path sentences, but the adequacy of these explanations is different,and some comprehension strategies still stay in the theoretical stage, and some empiricalresearches are needed to affirm them. In addition, most studies have focused on the nativeEnglish speakers, and whether the obtained data is suitable for the second language learners,and to what extent, second language proficiency will influence language comprehension,which are worth further researching.This study is to examine the Chinese English learners’ comprehension of the garden pathsentences in English through two experiments, and to try to answer the following fourquestions:1. How do Garden Path Sentences come into being from the Prototype CategorizationTheory?2. Are there differences in Second Language learners’ disambiguation of different typesof GP sentences?3. What laws can be followed about the parsing strategy in the process ofcomprehending GP sentences?4. What is the relation between Comprehension of different GP sentences and secondlanguage proficiency?This study used the methods of pen-and-paper test and interview, the subjects are60second-grade students of non-English major, two experimental tasks are following:(1) Thesubjects are required to translate20garden path sentences caused by semantic factors andsyntactic factors.(2) The participants are asked to comprehend15three different types ofgarden path sentences including1) direct object/subject ambiguity,2) direct object/sententialcomplement ambiguity, and3) main verb/reduced relative clause ambiguity, and complete awritten test. Afterwards, we summarize the use of comprehension strategy through syntacticanalysis. Then we will analyze and illustrate the relationship between second languageproficiency and disambiguation of different GP sentences by the use of Excel2007and SPSS17.0.According to the relevant data, we drew the conclusions:(1) The essential reason whythe garden path sentences come into being is that a reader or a listener conducts an analysis ofthe meaning of a word or syntactic structure of a sentence that are of non-prototype or a sentence that has different meanings following the line of thought elaborated in the PrototypeCategorization Theory.(2) Disambiguation of three different types of garden path sentences isvery different.(3) Most of the second language learners are serially dominated parsers.(4)The correlation of second language proficiency and disambiguation of different types ofgarden path sentences is different.This research is aimed to arouse the learners’ interest in studying English through thestudy on the different types of garden path sentences associated with different levels oflearners，thus, to facilitate the exploration of learning methods. We sincerely also hope thatthe study can cause the extensive concern of the English instructors so that they couldimprove teaching methods in teaching according to the the learners’ aptitude.