Ambiguity Resolution of English Relative Clauses by Persian Learners of English

Investigating the lack of ultimate native-like attainment in L۲ acquisition is among the concerns of psycholinguistic research. Processing differences have been argued to be among the underlying factors influencing the lack of native-like attainment. This study is an attempt to investigate how Persian learners of English resolve ambiguity in processing sentences containing two noun phrases and a relative clause that can be attached either high to NP۱or low to NP۲. To this end, ۳۰ advanced Persian learners of English participated in two experiments, both on-line and off-line tasks. The results showed that L۲ learners exhibit different attachment preferences compared to the native speakers of English. Moreover, the L۲ learners do not exhibit L۱-based preferences in L۲ English in the on-line task, which indicates they are not directly influenced by attachment preferences from their L۱. But transfer had an effect in the off-line task as the L۲ learners may resort to some metacognitive knowledge. The results of the current study suggest that L۲ learners integrate information relevant for parsing differently from native speakers, with the L۲ learners relying more on lexical-semantic cues than native speakers and less on phrase-structure rules.

کلیدواژه ها:

Parsing ، Lexical-semantic Rules ، Configurationality ، Predicate Proximity ، Recency