L1 and L2 syntactic ambiguity resolution of relative clauses

• Main Author: Rentillo, Philip Adrianne A.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2021
• Subjects: Tagalog language—Syntax; Kinaray-a language—Syntax; English language—Philippines—Syntax; Tagalog language—Relative clauses; Kinaray-a language—Relative clauses; English language—Philippines—Relative clauses; English Language and Literature; South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/faculty_research/11110
• Institution: De La Salle University

Syntactic ambiguity resolution is a cognitive mechanism that interacts with a range oflinguistic skills vital to comprehension. Research in this area has, for most of the time, involved European languages. Meanwhile, there is scant literature on a vast range of languages that possess distinct typological features that may hold an important role in unique and underexplored syntactic processes. Basing upon the Garden-Path Model, this study identifies attachment preference in two less explored languages, Tagalog and Kinaray-a, and in L2 English through relative clause parsing experiments. This also attempts to determine whether adjectival modification of noun phrases has a relationship with attachment preference scores. Chi-square tests of independence were conducted on experimental data and revealed a minimal relationship between select types of relative clauses according to adjectival modification and attachment preference. Data show contrasting patterns between Tagalog and Kinaray-a groups, where the former marginally lean towards low attachment (N2) and the latter towards high attachment (NI). Similar to Kinaray­a L2 English attachment preference takes the N 1 path, a contradiction to past findings on L 1 English.