Study of The Resolution of English Relative Clause Attachment Ambiguities by Trilingual Learners

Abstract

The study of the relative clause (RC) attachment is important in revealing the internal psychological processes of processing ambiguous sentences. It is worth exploring whether the existing attachment hypotheses apply to second and third-language learners. This study used an offline sentence acceptance test method to conduct a relative clause attachment ambiguity bias experiment on 35 Chinese students whose second language is English and whose third language is Thai. Research has shown that the subjects do not exhibit a significant attachment bias when processing ambiguous sentences related to English and Thai relative clauses with the NP1 of NP2-RC structure, but exhibited significant proximity bias when processing ambiguous sentences with the NP1 of NP2-RC structure.