Abstract
Forty‐five adult second language learners of English participated in this study, which investigated syntactically ambiguous sentences in which a prepositional phrase is interpreted as either an NP (noun phrase) attachment or VP (verb phrase) attachment (e.g., The cop saw the spy with binoculars). One group of 23 students performed comprehension tasks, first by listening to the sentences produced with no distinction in intonation favoring the NP or the VP interpretation, then by listening to the sentences produced with an intonation that favored the NP interpretation. A second group of 22 students performed comprehension tasks, first by reading the sentences with no preceding context, then by reading them preceded by a referential context. The students also did 2 sentence‐completion tasks, one manipulating “action verbs,” the other “psych and perception verbs,” to evaluate the verb‐based lexical biasing effect. Statistical analyses of the results showed lexical, syntactic, prosodic, and contextual constraints on processing of ambiguous sentences.
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