Eye Movements in Reading Russian Sentences with Global Syntactic Ambiguity in L1 Russian Learners of L2 English: An Implicit Prosodic Boundary Effect
A great number of studies verified different prosodic cues to relative-clause (RC) attachment in English as L1 and L2. The controversial one is the informative prosodic boundary between the main and the relative clause that reliably biased L1 English listeners to assume a high-attachment interpretation in global syntactic ambiguity resolution. The implicit prosodic boundary effect was also detected in "comma condition" before RC in sentences with local syntactic ambiguity in L1 English. However, this "comma effect" has not been tested in L2 English. Two stimulus blocks contained complex sentences with a comma and without a comma before ambiguous RCs, e.g.: Someone shot the maidNP] of the actressNP2 who was on the balcony (no-comma condition) vs. Someone shot the maidNP] of the actressNP2, who was on the balcony (comma condition). The authors used online and offline techniques in the study. The eye-movement study was conducted to verify an implicit prosodic boundary effect in L2 sentence processing by L1 Russian learners of L2 English because of well-researched different RC-attachment preferences in these languages: high-attachment for L1 Russian and low-attachment for L1 English. Hence, in reading the subjects could perform either L1 or L2 strategy in sentence processing. An implicit prosodic boundary indicated by a comma before the relative clause was assumed to be a facilitating factor for NP1 and NP2 reading times as opposed to "no-comma condition". Also, in "comma condition" NP1 should gain more prosodic prominence and fixation times in silent reading than NP2 because of an informative prosodic boundary. Using linear mixed-effects models, the eye-movement study showed that implicit prosody effect appeared only in late eye-movement measures: NP1 and NP2 total reading times were shorter in "comma condition" but not in "no-comma condition". Also, there were fewer fixations on NP1 and NP2 in "comma condition" as opposed to "no-comma condition" (b=-0.59; SE=0.17; p<0.0008). Early measures (gaze durations) were longer at NP1. This NP1 early activation in silent reading confirms the priority of early closure (high attachment preference) in early processing of L2 English sentences with global syntactic ambiguity by L1 Russian speakers. The observed early NP1-activation in silent reading confirms the priority of early closure (high attachment) in RC-attachment ambiguity resolution in Russian learners of L2 English according to language-dependent behavior. Russian bilinguals were sensitive to L1 grammar factor, since, in Russian, NP1 (madacc) in such sentences performs the argument function and has a greater prosodic weight as opposed to NP2 (actressgen) as the dependent noun in genitive. At the earliest stage of syntactic processing the subjects were also sensitive to the word frequency of NP1 and NP2 that caused shorter first fixation latency on high-frequency words. However, no significant RC-attachment preference was observed in offline questionnaire.
Keywords
глобальная синтаксическая неоднозначность,
определительное придаточное,
просодическая граница,
пунктуация,
чтение,
движения глаз,
английский язык как второй,
global syntactic ambiguity,
relative clause,
prosodic boundary,
punctuation,
reading,
eye movements,
English as second languageAuthors
| Vlasov Mikhail S. | Shukshin Altai State Humanities Pedagogical University | vlasov@bigpi.biysk.ru / vlasov_mikhailo@mail.ru |
| Savostyanov Alexander N. | State Scientific-Research Institute of Physiology and Basic Medicine; Novosibirsk State University; Institute of Cytology and Genetics of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences | alexander.savostyanov@gmail.com / savostyanov@bionet.nsc.ru / a.savostianov@g.nsu.ru |
| Sychev Oleg A. | Shukshin Altai State Humanities Pedagogical University | osn1@mail.ru |
| Saprygin Alexander E. | State Scientific-Research Institute of Physiology and Basic Medicine | saprigyn@mail.ru / sapriginae@physiol.ru |
Всего: 4
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