The role of discourse information in the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity in l2 English

The present thesis aims to examine the role of discourse information in determining the relative clause (RC) attachment preferences of Turkish second language (L2) speakers of English and monolinguals of English, and compares their sentence processing strategies in sentences including a complex noun phrase (NP) structure consisting of two NPs and a prepositional phrase (PP) [non-local NP + PP + local NP] modified by RC such as the following: Someone shot the servant [non-local NP] of [PP] the actress [local NP] who [RC pronoun] was standing on the balcony. The present study aims to investigate whether L2 speakers and the monolinguals perform the discourse information similarly or differently, during online and offline experiments of RC attachment ambiguity. Inference through the discourse relations is another distinguished feature of the IC (implicit causality) concept, which is supposed to overcome the syntactic information in the resolution of the RC attachment ambiguity, because the IC verbs require additional explanation about the reason "why". As the previous studies confirmed, the discourse inference can affect the syntactic process, IC verbs yield an expectation referring for the high attachment (non-local attachment) and non-IC verbs point to low attachment (local attachment). A set of offline (a sentence completion and a multiple choice questions test) and an online (a self-paced, word-by-word online reading test) experiments were given to 30 L2 speakers and 30 monolinguals. The data were analyzed with a 2X2X2 repeated measures ANOVA by condition (IC and non-IC sentences) and type (local attachment forced, non-local attachment forced) as within-subject variables. With respect to IC and non-IC conditions, there is a significant effect of discourse information in the resolution of RC attachment ambiguity for the monolinguals, on the other hand, the L2 speakers showed only high attachment in both IC and non-IC conditions which means that there is not any discourse effect on processing L2 English. This finding is consistent with the predictions of constraint based sentence processing theories and models such as; Referential Theory (Crain & Steedman, 1985; Altmann & Steedman, 1988) in L1 English. Nevertheless, the results of the L2 speakers' can be explained by the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) (Clahsen & Felser, 2006).