A Study On Ambiguity Resolution Of English Relative Clause Attachment By Mongolian Trilingual Learners

Over the last few decades RC attachment ambiguity resolution has become one of the hottest topics in the fields of psycholinguistics and second language acquisition.Ambiguity resolution of relative clause attachment preference has been a breakthrough point in the study of sentence processing,based of which,the field of sentence processing set to develop rapidly.Many relevant researches have been done on native speakers and L2 learners.Yet,comparatively little is done on trilingual learners,especially none is done on Mongolian trilingual learners.The findings and conclusions from ambiguity resolution of English relative clause attachment by Mongolian trilingual learners will make contributions to future study on the cognitive mechanism underlying Mongolian trilingual learners' language processing,and in particular on establishing a comprehensive models accounting for processing of complex structures.To inquire into the Mongolian trilingual learners' mental mechanism,it is essential to have a deep understanding at how their sentence parsing systems formed and developed through the ambiguity resolution research.Thus the present study investigates the Mongolian trilingual learners' beliefs toward English relative clause by questionnaires and then conducts practical tasks to test ambiguity resolution of English relative clause attachment by Mongolian trilingual learners.The main research questions to be addressed are the following:1.What beliefs do the Mongolian trilingual learners hold towards learning English relative clause?2.What are the results of the Mongolian trilingual learners' on-line ambiguity resolution of English relative clause(RC)attachment?3.What are the results of the Mongolian trilingual learners' off-line ambiguity resolution of English relative clause(RC)attachment?A questionnaire investigation of Mongolian trilingual learners' belief toward English relative clause was conducted on 100 MTL(Mongolian trilingual learners)from Inner Mongolia University,Inner Mongolia Normal University and Inner Mongolia University of Finance and Economics.30 out of the 100 subjects participated in the further disambiguation research.They are Non-English major sophomores from Inner Mongolia University of Finance and Economics.Overall 30 students passed the CET4 test in June,2017,and the grammatically judgment test also showed that they mastered the English relative clause(RC)well.The on-line self-paced reading task was carried out by the Eprime(Experimenter's Prime best),through which the reaction time of each segment was recorded in millisecond and the off-line task was done through a questionnaire test.The off-line questionnaire test will confirm the attachment preference through the subjects' responses toward the answers.The SPSS24.0 was used in data analysis.The data analysis of the experiment was based on two-factor variance analysis.The findings of the present study can be summarized from the following aspects;Firstly:(1)65% of the subjects believed that the materials written in English and Mongolian were more helpful to their understandings.(2)72% of the subjects believed that it was more effective to teach relative clause in Mongolian and English.(3)61% of the subjects believed that the structure of the English relative clause was close to Mongolian Relative clause.Secondly:(1)The Mongolian trilingual learners showed a native-like NP2 attachment preference(NP1 vs.NP2)(F=2.237.p<0.05).(2)For those in the condition linked by of,there was significant difference in reaction times between NP1 and NP2(MD= 1053,P < 0.05),while for the condition linked by with,there was no significant difference.The number of NP2 responses was significantly above the chance level for the of condition(t=4.011 p=0.03).However in the condition noun phrase was linked by with,no significant difference was found(t=-1.061 p=0.316).In addition,the on-line self-paced reading experiment also found that the Mongolian trilingual learners read slowly than ESL and English native speakers did.It can be inferred from these data that the lexical information and syntactic information L1 processing strategies transfer played an important role in the English RC disambiguating process by Mongolian trilingual learners.However,the second language transfer has been a impediment to learning and processing English.