A Study On The Relationship Between Garden Path Sentence Comprehension And Cognitive Control Among Chinese EFL Students

Cognitive control,one of the most basic but significant abilities for human beings,physically and psychologically,is meaningful to restrain the first reaction of human race as well as inner thoughts in daily activities,and most importantly,could produce a remarkable effect in language processing once confronted with contradictory situation like ambiguity resolution.Speaking of which,the comprehension of garden path sentences has always been a popular topic in second language acquisition,during which certain cognitive resources are highly activated in order to resolve the syntactic ambiguity.There have already been some studies relating garden path sentence comprehension to cognitive control,which underline that parsers’ comprehension of garden path sentence may be related to different levels of cognitive control.Therefore,this study was designed to investigate the relationship between garden path sentence comprehension and cognitive control among Chinese EFL students.Three cognitive tasks were designed in this research,which were,respectively,Wisconsin Card Sorting Test(WCST)for mental set shifting,Operation Span Task(OSPAN)for working memory and Flanker task for inhibition,together with a sentence processing task,in which there were 42 garden path sentences and 42 unambiguous sentences.This research was designed to investigate:(1)Is there any difference between the comprehension of garden path sentence and unambiguous sentence?(2)What’s the relationship between the accuracy of garden path sentence comprehension and cognitive control?(3)What’s the relationship between the response times of garden path sentence comprehension and cognitive control?Participants were 60 English major postgraduate students,who were then divided into high garden path group and low garden path group according to their performance on the comprehension of garden path sentence,controlling the factors like age,education years,socioeconomic status and English proficiency.The results show:(1)There is a significant difference among participants in the performance of garden path sentence compared with unambiguous sentence in terms of accuracy and RTs,which suggests the so-called “garden path” effect exist among parsers.(2)For accuracy,there is also a difference in the ability of mental set shifting,working memory and inhibition between high and low garden path groups.(3)For response times,there is a significant difference in working memory between high and low garden path groups.In light of the results of this research,it is safe to believe that even for high-proficiency EFL students,“garden path” effect still exists and also,there is a significant relationship between the accuracy of garden path sentence comprehension and cognitive control(i.e.mental set shifting,working memory,inhibition);there is a significant relationship between the RTs of garden path sentence comprehension and cognitive control(only working memory).The results of this research would promote the understanding as well as the attention to the role of different cognitive control abilities of Chinese EFL students when processing ambiguity like garden path sentences.The results not only suggest that the comprehension of garden path sentences may be related to different abilities of cognitive control,but also illustrate the necessities of attaching more importance to cognitive control during English ambiguity resolution.