Strategies for Parsing Syntactically Ambiguous Sentences by Japanese Learners of English Tatsuhiro Yoshida (original) (raw)
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1991
JapanSociety ofEnglish Language Education syntactic process "ras influenced by lexical information gained from the verb presented in the sentences Ce.g. transitivity and pQst verbal structures) , and that this infermatjon was utilized in on-line processing. JapanSociety ofEnglish Language Education patterns lexical4),, a phenomenon which was traditionally considered to be knowledge s.vnlacticalb, acquired. Thus, it will be interesting to investigate whether there is a difference between strategies used by advanced learners and those used by beginners.
The Effects of Context on the Strategies in Sentence Processing by Japanese Learners of English
1991
The purpose of the present study is to i~vestigate whether context affects the learner's on-line sentence processing. Yoshida (in press) found that Japanese advanced learners of English processed a sentence based on lexical forms retrieved from verbs. The results of the experiment showed that transitivity and the type of the complement structures affected the learner's on-line processing. when the sentence structure of the incoming material was not consistent with the lexical form the learner expected to appear, then, they needed to reanalyze the sentence and spent longer time. In the present study context which was relevant to the experimental sentence was presented, and whether contextual information affects learner's on-line sentence processing was investigated. HOIJever, the result showed no effect of the context IJas found. The possible factors which accounted for this result were discussed. 1. On-Line Sentence Processing One of the central issues in the study of hu...
The processing of ambiguous sentences by first and second language learners of English
Applied Psycholinguistics, 2003
This study investigates the way adult second language (L2) learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 learners of English with Greek or German as their first language participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. The results indicate that the L2 learners do not process ambiguous sentences of this type in the same way as adult native speakers of English do. Although the learners' disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical–semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent noun phrases (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they applied any phrase structure–based ambiguity resolution strategies of the kind that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. The L2 learners' performance also differs markedly from the results obtained from 6- to 7-year-old monolingua...
Resolution of syntactic category ambiguities: Eye movements in parsing lexically ambiguous sentences
Journal of Memory and Language, 1987
Three experiments explored the effects of the interaction of lexical and syntactic processes during language comprehension. Subjects read sentences containing lexical items that resulted in syntactic category ambiguities (e.g., desert trains, where desert can be a noun or an adjective and trains can be a verb or a noun). During reading, eye movements were monitored as a reflection of on-line parsing activities. The experiments tested alternative hypotheses about how the processor resolves syntactic category ambiguities. All experiments supported a delay strategy in which the processor delays assigning an analysis to a categorially ambiguous string until it receives disambiguating information dictating the correct analysis of the string. The implications of the results for a general theory of sentence comprehension are discussed. o 1987 Academic PKSS. 1~.
Syntactic ambiguity resolution while reading in second and native languages
The Quarterly Journal of …, 1997
Bilinguals' reading strategies were examined in their native and second language via the recording of eye movements. Experiment 1 examined the processing of sentences that contained local syntactic ambiguities. Results showed that bilinguals reading in their second language tended to resolve these ambiguities in a different way from native readers. Bilinguals tended to prefer to attach incoming information to the most recently processed constituent. However, this global strategy was in¯uenced by lexical information provided by the verb. Moreover, the combined analysis of both groups of readers revealed an in¯uence of verb subcategorization information on syntactic ambiguity resolution. Experiment 2 also examined syntactic ambiguity resolution in the native and second language, for sentences that were ambiguous in only one of the bilinguals' two languages. Results showed that bilinguals hesitated when reading in their second language at points in the sentence where their native language presented con¯icting lexical information. Following this localized effect of``transfer'', however, bilinguals performed in a manner similar to native speakers of the language. In combination, these experiments demonstrate that bilinguals perform a complete syntactic parsing of sentences when reading in the second language, and they do so in a manner similar to native speakers. Although lexical information can apparently in¯uence parsing in the second language, our results do not provide strong evidence that it acts to override syntactic analysis based on structural principles.
The interpretation of a lexical item can be locally ambiguous in real-time sentence processing. It should be too demanding for working memory to examine all the logically possible interpretations at each processing point, and the exhaustive examination Abstract This paper experimentally examines the effects of the case-markings and the constraint on the assignments and the receptions of thematic roles in Japanese sentence processing. A self-paced reading experiment was carried out with syntactically well-controlled Japanese sentences including homonyms locally ambiguous between nouns and verbs. The results showed that the homonyms were preferably disambiguated as verbs. We interpret this disambiguation as the result of the application of the thematic constraint to the input items on the basis of the correspondence between the case-markings and the grammatical functions in Japanese. We further examined the effect of pragmatic plausibility on the interpretation of the homonyms by questionnaire, and claim that the thematic constraint is still the chief determinant for their disambiguation even with the possible plausibility effects. We also examined the effect of the verbal working memory capacity estimated by the Japanese Reading Span Test, and we demonstrate that a reader with a high score in the test comprehends sentences more accurately but spends relatively longer time for reanalyses than a reader with a low score. We discuss the relevances of our results to the parsing models for real-time Japanese sentence processing and to the studies of verbal working memory in English.
This study investigates the way adult second language learners of English resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences such as The dean liked the secretary of the professor who was reading a letter. Two groups of advanced L2 learners of English with Greek or German as their L1 participated in a set of off-line and on-line tasks. The results indicate that the L2 learners do not process ambiguous sentences of the above type in the same way as adult native speakers of English do. While the learners' disambiguation preferences were influenced by lexical-semantic properties of the preposition linking the two potential antecedent NPs (of vs. with), there was no evidence that they were applying any phrase-structure based ambiguity resolution strategies of the kind that have been claimed to influence sentence processing in monolingual adults. The L2 learners' performance also differs markedly from the results obtained from 6 to 7 year-old monolingual English children in a parallel auditory study (Felser, Marinis, & Clahsen, submitted) in that the children's attachment preferences were not affected by the type of preposition at all.