Chinese English Learners’ Comprehension Strategy Of Garden Path Sentences

Due to its special local ambiguity, garden path (GP) sentence comprehension has long been studied by linguists and psycholinguists. The study of GP sentences is an important approach to gain insight into the working mechanism of language processing. All kinds of methods have been applied to the study of GP phenomenon. Most of the studies of this phenomenon have focused on the GP sentences caused by syntactic factors and semantic ones, and one of the most heated topics is the debate between "parallel models" and "serial models". However, almost all the studies have focused on the native English speaker’s comprehension on GP phenomenon. In our present study, we chose native Chinese speakers as our study subjects, hoping to find something different from the previous studies, and benefit English teaching and learning.The present study carries out an experiment on the garden path phenomenon which is intended to answer the following four questions:(1) Are there differences in Chinese English learners’disambiguation of different kinds of GP sentences?(2) Is second language proficiency closely related to disambiguation of GP sentences in time and accuracy rate?(3) Do gender differences affect people’s parsing of GP sentences?(4) What is the parsing strategy of Chinese Englsh learners?The experiment is conducted by think aloud method and interview. The subjects are sixty non-English major freshmen. They are required to do oral translation of12English GP sentences which are divided into three kinds:1) main verb/reduced relative clause ambiguity,2) direct object/sentential complement ambiguity, and3) direct object/subject ambiguity sentences. The whole translation test process is recorded, which is good for interviewing afterwards, helping to analyze the accuracy rates and parsing strategies. The findings are as follows:the accuracy rates and mean parsing time of the three kinds of sentences are quite different. Second language proficiency does not correlate significantly with the accuracy rates. Chinese English learners are more serial model-dominated parsers than the parallel model-dominated ones. Gender differences correlate significantly with the accuracy rates of the three kinds of GP sentences.This research aims to arouse Chinese English learners’, especially the college English learner’s interest toward English lernerning, by probing into the parsing strategies of GP sentences among different language proficiency and gender groups of Chinese learners, thus, to facilitate English teaching and learning. At the same time, we hope that when facing different English learning tasks, they can take appropriate and effective methods.