Abstract
This study explores whether Japanese EFL learners, too, find the processing of Garden Path (GP) sentences difficult and whether the capacity of L2 Working Memory (WM) limits the L2 learners' ability to deploy semantic and syntactic cues in parsing sentences. The result showed that Japanese EFL learners find GP sentences difficult to understand and that the former use semantic information as clues to avoid the difficulty in processing GP sentences, regardless of WM capacity, which is inconsistent with the L1 study. These results may stem from the e-f score, which reflects the speed-accuracy trade-off in the high-and low-span groups. Therefore, we propose using the efficiency score (p-e score), which takes processing speed into account.
