Ambiguity Resolution of English Relative Clause Attachment by Chinese Learners

The present study aims to determine Chinese learners' ambiguity resolution strategies of English relative clause (RC) attachment (e.g.Someone shotthe servant_NP1 ofthe actress_NP2who was standing on the balcony_RC) by conducting three experiments with 27 ESL learners at a Chinese university.Experiments One and Two examine the learners' strategies of RC disambiguation on-line and off-line by a self-paced reading technique and a questionnaire respectively.Experiment Three further explores the effects of post-syntactic features on the learners' RC ambiguity resolution by highlighting semantic-pragmatic features of the complex noun phrases of Materials in the Experiment Two.The results of self-paced reading technique show that the learners prefer to attach RC to NP1,indicating that syntactic features play a significant role in RC ambiguity resolution.Findings from the two questionnaires reveal that post-syntactic features such as lexical type and semantic-pragmatic cues also play a substantial role in the disambiguation due to the fact that the learners' RC attachment preference vary markedly under the impact of these factors.Besides,RC processing strategies of Chinese learners are constrained by their learning experience as well as syntactic competence.