A Review: RC Sentence Processing

Abstract

The question of whether and how native speakers and L2 learners process speech differently, as well as if transfer implications being available, may be answered by looking at ambiguity decision, one of the basic parsing procedures used in natural language processing. Studies have looked into how L1 and L2 speakers of different languages handle the RC ambiguity differently. In order to address the issues of transfer effects as well as the distinctions between L1 and L2 interpreting, differences between native speakers' and L2 learners' parsing selections, as well as some factors (working memory, animacy, discourse, syntax or semantic information, etc.) used during the experiments in ambiguity resolution, may add an entirely novel viewpoint. Although most of the studies tried to bring a solution with one-stage or two-stage models, the argument of this study is that there are definitely differences between the L1 and L2 processing and ambiguity resolving, and also, universality is impossible. Therefore, there needs to be much more evidences with the same instruments, tasks, and same sources of information conducted to vast amount of participant groups (from different ages, or different backgrounds) in order to reach a certain conclusion to state the reason behind this difference.