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Felser, C., Roberts, L., Gross, R., & Marinis, T. (2003). The Processing of Ambiguous Sentences by First and Second Language Learners of English. Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 453-89. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0142716403000237

has been cited by the following article:

• TITLE: Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution of Cantonese-English Bilinguals: Evidence from Prepositional Phrase and Adverb

  AUTHORS: Bing Bai

  KEYWORDS: Syntactic Ambiguity, Cantonese-English Bilinguals, Parsing, Language Processing

  JOURNAL NAME: Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, Vol.8 No.3, May 22, 2018

  ABSTRACT: Syntactic ambiguity resolution is influenced by multiple constraints. A sentence-picture matching task tested the attachment of prepositional phrase (PP) such as on the chair within an utterance like Mary ate the apple on the chair. PP attaching to NP2 (the apple) is called low attachment (LA), while PP attaching to V (ate) is called high attachment (HA). A comprehension task tested the attachment of adverb such as quickly within an utterance like the story Mary was reading quickly put her little sister into sleep. The checked adverbs attaching to the verb of the embedded clause (VEC) and to the verb of the main clause (VMC) were analyzed. Cantonese-English bilinguals were grouped according to their L2 proficiency. Results reflected that 1) both groups showed preference to HA for PP, 2) LP group showed preference to VMC for adverb attachment; 3) there is a large gap in LA between LP and HP, suggesting that syntactic ambiguity resolution involves interaction of all the information available. The relationship between language proficiency and parsing is not so definitely supported by the results.