Off-line Syntactic Processing Strategies for Japanese EFL Learners (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.
2014
In this paper the question of how advanced learners of English process syntactica]Iy ambiguous sentences is investigated, First, some recent I.1 studies investigating huinan sentence processing were reviewed, Then, the results of two experiments which explored how Japanese learners of English process sentences were reported, The subjects were presented with syntactically ambiguous English sentences segmented into some parts on the computer screen. For Experiment I, sentences containing transitive verbs and intransitive v rbs were presented. For Experiment II, sentences containing verbs which were predominantly used in direct-object
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...
Linguistics, 2008
Previous research in the sentence comprehension literature has established that people expend resources keeping track of partially processed phrase structures during the process of comprehending sentences. An open question in this literature has been what units of syntactic expectation cost the human parser utilizes. Two viable options from the literature are (1) incomplete syntactic dependencies; and (2) predicted syntactic heads. This article provides a self-paced reading experiment from Japanese-a head-final language-that tests the incomplete dependency hypothesis. The materials in the current experiment manipulate the number of dependents of an upcoming verb, by manipulating (1) the presence/absence of a locative postpositional phrase modifier of the verb and (2) the presence/absence of a dative argument of the verb. The results failed to show any support for the incomplete dependency hypothesis, but were completely consistent with the predictions of the predicted head hypothesis. Taken with the results from the literature, these results o¤er support for the predicted head hypothesis.
The relationship between syntactic knowledge and reading comprehension in EFL learners
Studies in Second Language Learning and Teaching, 2012
Via a variety of measurements, 64 Hungarian native speakers in the 12th grade learning English as a foreign language in Slovakia were tested in a cross-sectional correlational study in order to determine the relationship between the ability to process complex syntax and foreign language reading comprehension. The test instruments involved a standardized reading comprehension test in English, and a test of syntactic knowledge in both Hungarian and English, in addition to a background questionnaire in Hungarian. Power correlations and regression analyses rendered results that showed syntactic knowledge to be a statistically significant estimator for foreign language reading comprehension. The study provides evidence that the ability to process complex syntactic structures in a foreign language does contribute to one's efficient reading comprehension in that language.
9 An on-line look at sentence processing in the second language
Advances in Psychology, 2002
On-line sentence processing in the second language In J. Altarriba and R. Herridia (Eds.) Syntactic processing in the second language What are the factors that affect immediate syntactic processing in the second language of bilinguals? How might processing evolve with increasing skill in the second language? Herein, we will review these questions in the light of data from several on-line investigations of syntactic processing in the native and second language of bilinguals with varying levels of second language proficiency. Performance is examined, moreover, for bilinguals of different language backgrounds. The data from these experiments highlight the role of L2 exposure, in line with models based upon linguistic experience.
ABSTRACT Having a proper insight into understanding the human cognition in sentence processing strategies, this study explored the nature of Minimal Attachment and Late Closure strategies in relation to language proficiency levels. Facing the problem that why some EFL learners tend to parse differently (i.e., use Minimal Attachment and Late Closure Strategies), on one hand and the need to develop a reliable and valid instrument to do the respective investigation on the other hand, was the motive behind this study. By administering a Preliminary English Test (PET), three groups of Iranian adult EFL learners, both male and female were conventionally classified into three levels of proficiency. Three separate researcher-made sentence comprehension tests (each for one proficiency level) were then adopted as the main data collecting instruments through applying „Think- Aloud Protocol‟ in which all steps of instrument validation were taken. Findings revealed the use or better to say construct validity of various strategies. Meanwhile, the analyses revealed that the parsing strategies are, to some extent if not that much, associated with language proficiency levels, indicating that language proficiency level has some degree of effect on the participants‟ use of parsing strategies as a whole, although findings on Minimal Attachment and Late Closure strategy use as two separate ones differed. While, there was not much effect of language proficiency level on Minimal Attachment strategy, the findings indicated a moderately large effect size on Late Closure strategy use and the three groups showed almost higher means on Late Closure strategy rather than the other one. Therefore, certain parsing strategies are associated with language proficiency level proving the fact that language proficiency level is an effective parameter as far as human cognition in language processing in general and sentence processing in particular are concerned. Moreover, not only is there relationship among language proficiency levels and the strategy use but the nature of relationship varies depending on language proficiency level and strategy type. Key words: Language proficiency- Late Closure strategy- Minimal Attachment strategy- Parsing- Validity gabbasian@gmail.com
The Effects of Word Order and Case Marking Information on the Processing of Japanese
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 1997
Many studies in processing English report that verb information plays a significant role in processing the rest of the sentence (e.g., . Japanese is subject-object-verb (SOV), head-final language with the phenomena of scrambling and phonologically null pronouns. The fact that verb information does not become available until the end of a clause leads one to ask whether other types of information may be utilized in the on-line processing of Japanese. The current study investigated whether word order and case markers play a role. Overall, no effect of word order was observed, even though the frequency of the scrambled sentences was low. Experiment 1 found no extra processing load in processing scrambled sentences. In Experiment 2, no effect of word order was found in the parser's decision making in computing a syntactic structure prior to the verb. On the other hand. Experiment 3 found that the parser was sensitive to the variety of case-marked arguments. The results of the three experiments are more congruent with the nonconfigurational structure than with the configurational structure at the stage of preverbal syntactic processing in Japanese.
Second Language Processing ofFiller-Gap Dependencies: Evidence for the Role of Lexical Access
2013
Sentences that involve direct and indirect object relative clauses contain displaced syntactic constituents (or fillers) that do not appear in their canonical object position following the verb. During real-time comprehension, when the head of such a relative clause is encountered, it has been argued that the human sentence processing mechanism will automatically project a syntactic structure that includes a trace where the displaced element originated as an object of its licensing verb (e.g., Frazier, 1987; Frazier & Fodor, 1978). The referent of the filler, after it is accessed in the lexicon, will be temporarily stored in working memory, until the moment at which this trace (or gap) is encountered later during sentence processing and at which the filler can thus be retrieved from memory and integrated into the structure (e.g., Bever & McElree, 1988; Love & Swinney, 1996; Nicol & Swinney, 1989). Thus, processing a filler-gap dependency involves not only the computation of a moveme...