The role of parsing strategies in comprehension of L2 Russian syntactically ambiguous sentences

In written language processing, parsers make use of semantic information and are guided by syntactic constraints. Many factors affect stimuli processing and comprehension, and parsing strategies are among them. The present study addresses the question of whether or not there is a transfer of L1 parsing strategies to L2 sentence processing. So far, the literature says that language learners are occasionally driven by L1 structural constraints in processing of their target language. Is this point valid for different structures and languages? To test this, the study focuses on L2 comprehension of Russian globally and temporarily ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with a complex nominal group – in what way it is affected by L1. The study engages both monolingual speakers of Russian with no/little L2 knowledge and English-speaking learners of L2 Russian. Theoretically significant to psycholinguistics, this research is first-ever in making comparisons of L1 and L2 comprehension of the reviewed sentences. The study examines whether the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al., 1996) can account for the data from monolingual speakers of Russian and English-speaking advanced learners of Russian. Also, the research has potential implications for language pedagogy in fostering the most effective L2 teaching scenarios and in stimulating teaching Russian syntax to native and non-native language speakers. Copyright © 2021 IGSS.