The Connectionist Approach of Processing L2 Ambiguous English Sentences

Abstract

The connectionist approach to language processing is popular in second language (L2) study in recent years. The paper is to investigate the connectionist approach of Chinese learners’ individual differences in the comprehension of certain ambiguous English sentences. Comprehension accuracy and grammaticality judgment are carried out with three groups with different background of language experience, namely, well-experienced English natives (group 1), well-experienced non-native English learners (group 2) and semi-experienced non-native English learners (group 3) on four types of ambiguous English sentences such as The polite actor thanked the old man who carried the black umbrella. Results of the study are discussed and a number of conclusions based on the results are summarized with regard to L2 learners’ differences in the performance to comprehend ambiguous syntactic structures.