Investigation into sentence comprehension in language users of Russian and English

The literature of language pedagogy has often been suggesting that output production and input comprehension are the two facets, which are crucial for language learning and teaching. In order to comprehend a sentence, a language user is supposed to execute a number of particular tasks concomitantly such as linking words with their meanings (semantic comprehension) and deriving meaning from the liaison of words in a sentence (syntactic comprehension). There are more tasks, which come along the way, suggesting that highly complex processes underlie sentence comprehension as a part of a whole-text comprehension. In this paper, the author addresses the phenomenon of sentence comprehension by reviewing the linguistic frameworks, which shed the light on sentence comprehension in mono- and bilinguals. To test the frameworks, the paper further reports on the behavioral study on Russian-English bilinguals, with the twofold research question: which type of L1 and L2 sentence comprehension is faster, semantic or syntactic; and which type of L1 and L2 sentence comprehension is more accurate, semantic or syntactic? For the actual experiment, the subjects were asked to push the left or right arrow of the keyboard to judge about the correctness of the presented sentences. The outcome of each trial was the data with reaction time and accuracy, which are the important research strands. The results of the study inform language pedagogy in that semantic comprehension on the sentence level in bilinguals is more accurate than syntactic type. Copyright © 2020 ICLT.