Where the classic garden-path paradigm uses sentences that are locally ambiguous but syntactically well-defined, this study inverts it with an adapted paradigm of semantically ambiguous but syntactically unambiguous sentences, so that only a reader who actually deploys syntactic parsing can disambiguate them. In an experiment with 140 Chinese learners of English (analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistics), it shows that these learners systematically under-utilize syntactic processing during comprehension, distinguishing two forms - partial and complete parsing under-utilization - and tracing both to trial-and-error in syntactic processing. The finding motivates a proposed parsing method that forces syntactic processing back into the comprehension routine to improve L2 English reading.
Many studies have revealed that sentence comprehension relies more on semantic processing than on syntactic processing. However, previous studies have predominantly emphasized the preference for sema…