A Comparative Study Of Chinese Students' Processing Of Chinese And English Ambiguous Sentences

Reading is the meaningful interpretation of printed or written verbal symbols. For many students, reading is by far the most important of the four skills in learning a foreign language. A great many researchers, both linguistic and psychological, have put much attention on the study of reading in different aspects, for example, Chinese and English phonological reading, letter identification, and word reading. In the field of ambiguous sentence reading, garden path sentences have been a hotspot in recent years. However, the target of these studies is limited to English language, there hardly is any study on Chinese, not to mention the comparison between Chinese and English.This thesis is an experimental study on Chinese students' understanding of both Chinese and English ambiguous sentences. The subjects are ninety-seven students in Zhejiang University, who belong to three different classes. They were asked to read twenty English and twenty Chinese ambiguous sentences. The result reveals that the given theories can explain students' understanding of some of the sentences.In addition, there exist similarities and differences in the understanding of Chinese and English ambiguous sentences. And there are also slight differences between students of different language proficiency levels. Undergraduate students who generally have lower language proficiency than postgraduate students sometimes do not have the necessary linguistic ability to correctly understand a given sentence while postgraduate students can make good use of their linguistic ability to analyze sentences.