L1 and L2 processing and comprehension of Russian locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences /

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Student Theses

2022

Darzhinova, Liubov

Hong Kong : The Education University of Hong Kong

Thesis

Syntactic ambiguity occurs when more than one reading is available within one sentence, eventually resulting in one interpretation (local ambiguity) or multiple interpretations (global ambiguity). To get a clearer picture of how syntactic ambiguity is resolved across languages, the present study utilized a participial relative clause with three noun phrase attachment sites in Russian, a construction that was not employed previously, to study processes that occur while reading syntactically ambiguous sentences. The study examined the attachment preferences of monolingual Russian speakers and English-speaking learners of Russian during processing and comprehension of locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP attachment sites in Russian (Experiment 1) and whether disambiguation by pragmatic congruence leads to modification of these attachment preferences (Experiment 2). The study also tested whether the two-factor model by Gibson et al. (1996) can predict these attachment preferences. Participants of each experiment read six experimental sentences per each condition and 60 fillers by pressing the space bar in the self-paced reading fashion. They were also asked to respond to questions by choosing one of the three noun phrase options. If the read sentence seemed ungrammatical or unacceptable in Russian, they pressed the button specified as ungrammatical.The generalized linear mixed-effects modeling of the collected data revealed that in processing, native Russian speakers show high attachment preference, whereas English-speaking learners of Russian demonstrate both low and high attachment preferences. During comprehension, native speakers do not exhibit any preference, whereas learners show only low attachment preference. The analyses also revealed processing facilitation for syntactically unpreferred attachment conditions in native speakers in Experiment 2, suggesting modulation of attachment preference through pragmatic congruence. Pragmatic congruence did not level out the ungrammaticality rate across conditions in the same group, implying no effect of pragmatic congruence on comprehension. No conclusive remarks could be offered about processing in learners of Russian due to incomparable L2 proficiency level among participants of the experiments. At the same time, there were additional grammaticality benefits for syntactically preferred high attachment and low attachment conditions. As a result, based on findings from first and second language processing and comprehension in Russian, the study supports that one factor, Predicate Proximity, in the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al., 1996) is operative in native Russian speakers, and the factor of Recency Preference is dominant in English-speaking learners of Russian. The study stresses the importance of the facilitating role of congruence of an input with reader’s general knowledge. In conclusion, some limitations, suggestions, and the potential avenue to be accounted for in future research are discussed

LG51.H43 Dr 2022eb Darzhinoval

https://educoll.lib.eduhk.hk/records/3TYGyYpM