چکیده:
Investigating the lack of ultimate native-like attainment in L2 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 NP1or low to NP2. To this end, 30 advanced Persian learners of English participated in two experiments, both on-line and off-line tasks. The results showed that L2 learners exhibit different attachment preferences compared to the native speakers of English. Moreover, the L2 learners do not exhibit L1-based preferences in L2 English in the on-line task, which indicates they are not directly influenced by attachment preferences from their L1. But transfer had an effect in the off-line task as the L2 learners may resort to some metacognitive knowledge. The results of the current study suggest that L2 learners integrate information relevant for parsing differently from native speakers, with the L2 learners relying more on lexical-semantic cues than native speakers and less on phrase-structure rules.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Considering the differences between native speakers and second language learners in the way they process language and the parsing strategies they employ to process sentences many studies have been carried out all which examined the way advanced L2 learners of English from different language backgrounds resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities a phenomenon which is known to be subject to cross linguistic variation.
According to the results from previous psycholinguistic studies, adult native speakers of English tend to associate the relative clause with the second rather than the first NP, that is, with the actress, in both off-line (Cuetos & Mitchell, 1988, Dussias, 2001, Fernández, 1999; Gilboy, Sopena, Clifton, & Frazier, 1995) and on-line reading comprehension tasks (Carreiras & Clifton, 1999; Henstra, 1996; Fernández, 2000).
According to Gibson, Pearlmutter, Canseco-Gonzalez, and Hickock (1996), the NP2 preference that is typically found in English can be accounted for by assuming that in highly configurational languages like English, ambiguous modifiers are integrated into the current parse in accordance with the locality principle of Recency, which favors attachment of an ambiguous phrase to the most recently processed constituent, which is similar to the Late Closure Strategy proposed earlier by Frazier (1979) and Frazier and Fodor (1978).
Considering the studies carried out by Gross (2002) and Papadopulou and Clahsen (2006) in German and Greek respectively, an NP2 preference for NPs joined by a thematic preposition has been confirmed although an NP1 preference has been attested in these languages for complex genitive antecedents which suggests that the lexical bias is strong enough to override any phrase-structure based locality principle that favors NP1 attachment.