This Article Full Text (PDF) References Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Ying, H. G. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Relevance mapping: a study of second language learners’ processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences in English

University of Colorado at Denver, HongGuang.Ying{at}cudenver.edu

Forty adult Chinese-speaking learners of English and 20 native speakers of American English participated in a study of second language learners’ interpretation of syntactically ambiguous sentences involving that-clauses that could potentially be interpreted as complements or as relative clause. Two sentence interpretation tasks suggest that the principle of relevance constrained the interpretations. The learners showed a preference for interpreting the that-clause as a complement in the first task, using fewer syntactic nodes because it involved less processing effort. In the second task, however, the learners showed a preference for the relative clause reading, suggesting that the procedural information encoded by preceding referential sentences had the effect of reducing the overall processing effort required and of guiding the second language (L2) learners towards the intended contextual effects.

Second Language Research, Vol. 20, No. 3, 232-255 (2004)
DOI: 10.1191/0267658304sr239ra


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?