A comparative study of the processing of ambiguous sentences by advanced Chinese ESL speakers and native English speakers

Syntactic ambiguity resolution has figured prominently in psycholinguistic research since the early 1970s, with many studies conducted in English and a few other languages. However, there has been a paucity of published research on English as a Second Language (ESL) learners' processing of ambiguous sentences.; The present study is exploratory in nature and was carried out with the following purposes in mind: (1) to determine if ESL and native English speakers experience any difficulty when processing ambiguous sentences, (2) to explore their processing strategies, (3) to determine if and how the limited English proficiency of the ESL speakers interferes with their sentence processing, (4) to investigate any potential cross-linguistic influence on sentence processing, and (5) to find possible connections between the subjects' language learning experiences and their processing strategies.; This study focused on one of the most frequently investigated type of ambiguous sentences, the main verb/reduced relative clause ambiguity (e. g., The horse raced past the barn fell). The methods used included a self-paced reading task, a think aloud task, a recall task, observations, a questionnaire, and an interview. The self-paced reading task was administered on computers; the think aloud, recall, and observations were videotaped; and the interview was audiotaped. Four advanced Chinese-speaking ESL learners and four native English speakers participated in this study. There were three sessions for each subject.; The quantitative results from the self-paced reading study show significant effects for both subject groups and sentence types. The qualitative think aloud, recall, questionnaire, interview, and observation data indicate that both the ESL and the native speakers were sensitive to lexical frequency effects. These findings also indicate that the limited English proficiency of the Chinese ESL speakers, in terms of vocabulary knowledge, ability to use discourse constraints, and reliance on their first language, caused them to access processing strategies different from those of the native speakers. The educational experiences also proved to be a major factor in shaping the way each group processed the ambiguous sentences. In light of the findings from this study, a model for first and second language MV/RR sentence processing is proposed.