A Study Of Relationship Of Learners' Reading Ability And Ambiguity Resolution Of English Garden Path Sentence

Garden path sentence is a kind of temporary local ambiguity sentence,and it is a special ambiguity phenomenon.Research on the ambiguity resolution of garden path sentences has always been the focus of linguists and psycholinguists,which is significant for the exploration of the processing mechanism of human language.This study is designed to investigate the relationship between Chinese EFL learners' L2 reading ability and ambiguity resolution of English garden path sentences.The study has designed a garden path sentence comprehension experiment to examine the performance of EFL learners with different reading ability in the ambiguity resolution of garden path sentences.Participants were 60 sophomore English-majors from a university in Jiangxi,who were divided into skilled readers and less-skilled readers group,and each group has 30 students.Participants were required to read 20 sentences that include 10 garden path sentences and 10 unambiguous sentences.All of the garden path sentences in this study were main-subordinate complex sentences.After reading each sentence,participants needed to answer a general question about the sentence.The experiment was implemented in E-Prime 2.0 where participants' response time and answers were recorded.All the statistical data were analyzed in SPSS 24.The experimental results demonstrate that(1)Learners' reading ability affects the ambiguity resolution of garden path sentences.Skilled readers do better than less-skilled readers when comprehending garden path sentences(p=.000<.05 for response time,p=.000<.05 for score).(2)Less-skilled readers' difficulty in the ambiguity resolution of garden path sentences lies in the difficulty of understanding subordinate clause(p=.000<.05 for score);the difference of ambiguity resolution of garden path sentence between skilled readers and less-skilled readers mainly reflects on the interpretation of subordinate clause(p=.030<.05 for response time,p=.000<.05 for score).(3)Learners' reading ability correlated with the ambiguity resolution of garden path sentences(r=-.699* for response time,r=.790** for score)and mainly with subordinate clause(r=-.326* for response time,r=.617** for score).Hence,the results of this research indicate that Chinese EFL learners' L2 reading ability is a crucial factor during the process of ambiguity resolution of English garden path sentences.The results support the Structure Building Framework theory(Gernsbacher,1990),which predicts that skilled readers perform a more efficient suppression mechanism.According to Structure Building Framework theory,less-skilled readers fail to restrain irrelevant information,hence,generate and maintain too many sub-structures,which will increase readers' burden.Therefore,they have trouble in the ambiguity resolution of garden path sentences.The above findings contribute to the fields of second language reading and English teaching in China form theoretical and pedagogical perspective.From theoretical perspective,the results of the present study have proved the correlation between reading ability and ambiguity resolution of garden path sentences,and developed Structure Building Framework.From pedagogical perspective,the results of this study indicate that English teachers should cultivate learners' reading ability by strengthening the training of suppression mechanism to improve learners' ambiguity resolution of garden path sentences.