The Role of First Language and Proficiency Level on the Acquisition of Quantification and negation in English Ambiguous Sentences by Persian learners

Investigating scope ambiguity in L2 acquisition is among the debated issues in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistic. Doubly quantified sentences, which can be interpreted in terms of surface and inverse scope, are among the ambiguous sentences deserving further scrutiny in the SLA process. The current study was an attempt to examine the role of learners’ L1 and proficiency level on their interpretation of quantified and negative ambiguous English sentences such as Elena did not paint an egg by Persian EFL learners. To this end, 06 intermediate and advanced L2 learners from Yazd University were asked to participate in a translation task followed by an interpretation task, a binary choice test. The results of the first task revealed a significant difference between the two groups as well as a significant main effect of the L1.The results of the interpretation task revealed that both proficiency groups were significantly different from each other concerning their choice of the surface and inverse scope with a higher preference for the inverse scope interpretation

کلیدواژه ها:

Ambiguity ، Negation ، Quantification ، Surface Scope ، Inverse Scope ، L1 background ، proficiency level