日本人英語学習者の後置修飾理解 : 句単位の読解時間の観点から

概要

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The aim of this paper is to investigate the difficulties Japanese EFL learners encounter in reading various post-modifications. First language (L1) psycholinguistic studies show that difficulties to comprehend sentences with relative clauses are attributed to processing difficulty of these structures. It is possible that the difficulties Japanese EFL learners encounter in reading such complex sentences can be also caused by processing difficulty, but little research has been conducted so far to examine this possibility. In this study we conducted a self-paced reading task to examine how Japanese EFL learners process English sentences with post-modification structures. The results of our experiment suggest that the ease/difficulty in comprehending these sentences for Japanese EFL learners also depends on processing difficulty. The detailed reading time analyses reveal that particular regions in the sentences are responsible for learners' processing difficulty. It could be a result of the violation of the canonical word order and/or the absence of relativizers.