Reading in a second language: Influences of context, world knowledge, and structural complexity

Reading is a complex skill that requires processing of phonological, semantic, and syntactic information. In addition, information from different parts of a text needs to be stored and integrated. Things become especially difficult when parts of a sentence are ambiguous, meaning more than one interpretation is possible. In this talk, I present the results of a series of reading tasks investigating how native English speakers and native Spanish speakers that speak English as a second language interpret ambiguous sentences. We manipulated structural complexity of the sentences preceding the critical sentence (the context), text-explicit information, and world knowledge to examine which of these factors affect PP attachment. Our results show that like native English speakers, second language speakers prefer high attachment, but interpretations are flexible and influenced by text-explicit and pragmatic information. However, we also found differences between how native English speakers and second language speakers read and interpret such sentences.