چکیده:
The present study intended to investigate the processing behavior of 2 groups of L2 learners of English (high and mid in proficiency) and a group of English native speakers on English active and passive reduced relative clauses. Three sets of tasks, an offline task, and 2 online tasks were conducted. Results revealed that the high-proficiency group’s performance was the same as that of the native group in all the 3 tests in terms of accuracy and processing behavior. Accordingly, it was concluded that proficient L2 learners can achieve native-like performance. Also, opposed to maturational propositions on adult L2 learning following the critical period hypothesis, the high-proficiency participants showed native-like behavior on the L2 structures. We suggest that the amount of exposure to an L2 can be a defining factor for L2 learners to perform in a native-like manner.
خلاصه ماشینی:
ir ²&³University of Isfahan Received: 08/06/2014 Accepted: 09/09/2014 Abstract The present study intended to investigate the processing behavior of 2 groups of L2 learners of English (high and mid in proficiency) and a group of English native speakers on English active and passive reduced relative clauses.
For that reason, the present study tried to examine the processing behaviors of two groups of mid-proficiency (MP) and high-proficiency (HP) L2 learners of English (nonimmersed) with a group of English native speakers regarding an ambiguous morphosyntactic construction, that is, English active and passive reduced relative clauses.
The problem with processing such sentences arises by the fact that the word ‘tied’ is considered as the main verb rather than a participle introducing a reduced relative clause, and it is not corrected far later through reanalysis (Ferreira, Christianson, & Hollingworth, 2001).
The results from the sentence processing tasks revealed that, first, the L2 learners were slower than the native speakers, and second, parsing was easy in ESL in relation to genetically- related languages.
The studies cited above demonstrate a controversy on whether or not nonnatives can develop native-like processing patterns, in the light of similar results for both groups obtained in offline tasks (Juffs, 1998a, 1998b), and if the similar results gained in offline tasks can be indicative of the processing ability in online tasks (Rah & Adone, 2010).
Therefore, the present study intended to have a closer look at these issues by comparing the processing of an ambiguous morphosyntactic construction, that is, English passive reduced relative clauses, between two groups of L2 learners ( with mid- and high-proficiency levels) and English native speakers.