Use of Referential Discourse Contexts in L2 Offline and Online Sentence Processing.
The present study aimed to investigate (a) the extent to which Chinese-speaking learners of English in Taiwan use referential noun phrase (NP) information contained in discourse contexts to complete ambiguous noun/verb fragments in a sentence completion task, and (b) whether and when they use the contexts to disambiguate main verb versus reduced relative clause (MV/RRC) ambiguities in real time. Results showed that unlike native English speakers, English learners did not create a marked increase in RRC completions in biasing two-NP-referent discourse contexts except for advanced learners. Nevertheless, like native speakers, the learners at elementary, intermediate, and advanced English proficiency levels all used the information in a later stage of resolving the MV/RRC ambiguities in real time. The delayed effect of referential context information observed suggests that L2 learners, like native speakers, are able to construct syntax-to-discourse mappings in real time. It also suggests that processing of syntactic information takes precedence over integration of syntactic information with discourse information during L1 and L2 online sentence processing.
Foreign Languages Education Center, National Kaohsiung Marine University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. pilany@webmail.nkmu.edu.tw.
Pi-Lan
PL
Yang
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D019303:Multilingualism; D011578:Psycholinguistics / Q000379:methods*; D011932:Reading; D013624:Taiwan; D006113:United Kingdom; D055815:Young Adult
L2 offline and online sentence processing; MV/RRC ambiguities; Referential discourse contexts