Relative Clause Attachment Preference in Second Language Sentence Processing: Evidence from Indonesian Learners of English.

This research aims to reveal the relative clause attachment preference in L2 sentence processing from the perspective of Indonesian learners of English. This objective is specified into the investigation of attachment preference of the Indonesian learners of English and the effect of syntactic proficiency on their L2 English sentence processing. Consequently, both investigations shed light on the architecture and universality of L2 sentence processing. Three quantitative studies were conducted in the attempt to achieve the research objectives. Yogyakarta State University graduate students of the English Education and Applied Linguistics program majoring in English Education and English Literature participated in a judgement task and two self-paced reading (SPR) tasks. The judgement task provided an offline measure for the identification of attachment preference, while an SPR task of an experimental design served as the online measure. Another SPR task was devised to examine the effect of syntactic proficiency on L2 sentence processing. The judgement task study was in the form of questionnaire, with Kuder Richardson 20 formula suggesting a high internal consistency of the instrument (KR-20 = 0.84), while the generalized-H index reflected a well-defined latent variable to be stable across studies (G-H = 0.93). Both SPR tasks recorded the participants’ reaction time data on the monitor- displayed stimulus in milliseconds. An absolute cut-off method and outlier detection using z-scores were applied to the reaction time data to enhance the reliability of both studies. All instruments were consulted with an instrument validator, with the task administration followed a standardized procedure. The judgement task and the first SPR task both of which investigated the participants’ attachment preference were analysed using the t-test comparison of means. Meanwhile a generalized linear model was utilized to examine the effect of syntactic proficiency on L2 sentence processing in the latter SPR task. The results show a marked tendency for an Early Closure attachment preference in the offline measure of judgement task, while no distinctive preference identified in the online measure of SPR task, indicating a possible modulatory role of working memory. On the effect of syntactic proficiency on L2 sentence processing, the results of the SPR task reveal an apparent decrease in reaction time of the final clause as the participants’ syntactic proficiency scores increase. The results of all three studies consulted with the previous research findings suggest an exposure-based nature of L2 sentence processing in the discussion of processing universality, and the modulatory role of syntactic proficiency in the architecture of L2 sentence processing. From these findings, the present research suggests the L2 researchers take into account the proposed L2 sentence processing model for further systematization of language processing, and L2 teachers to consider the underlying importance of syntactic parsing in developing learning approaches and materials