Reading methods and referential context effects in L2 ambiguity resolution

Abstract

Second language (L2) learners syntactic processing is known to be shallow and fragile, but a number of studies have indicated that L2 learners have the potential to overcome their weak syntactic representations and have more concrete syntactic processing under some specific circumstances (Lim and Ahn 2015; Lim and Christianson 2013a, 2013b, 2015; Williams 2006). This study examined L2 learners ambiguous sentence processing through various factors, and investigated whether the auditory perceptual simulation (APS) method induces faster reading times and better comprehension results for an ambiguous sentence such as The patient presented by the doctor felt embarrassed forgetting all the attention compared to silent reading, and whether different contextual information affects the learners in processing such ambiguous sentences more effectively. In a self-paced reading experiment, participants read reduced clause or unreduced relative clause sentences preceded by 1-NP-referent contexts or 2-NP-referents contexts through silent reading or APS reading. If the APS reading group were affected by prosodic information, they would have faster reading times and higher accuracy rates than the silent reading group. In addition, if the participants were able to use the referential information from the context, the 2-NP-referents contexts would also show better processing. The results revealed that both the silent reading group and the APS reading group had good comprehension outcomes, indicating that reading methods had no effects in inducing the readers to process ambiguous sentences. However, the reading times for the target region showed the effects of the reading method, the proficiency, the context, and the sentence type, indicating that APS reading enhanced reading of past participles of reduced relative clause more naturally. Especially for the intermediate learners, there was a significant main effect for the APS reading methods, which helped them to have better reading skills for syntactic processing.