The Contribution of Working Memory Capacity to Processing Sentences with Prepositional Phrases for Japanese EFL Learners

Abstract

This research addresses whether Working Memory (WM) capacity influences syntactic parsing strategies by using temporarily ambiguous prepositional phrases (such as "The boy read the book on the chair instead of the other books."). We used four types of expenmental sentences: minimal attachment and non-minimal attachment sentences, and two versions of modificand-prepositional phrase distance (i.e., short and long versions). The results showed that Japanese EFL learners, as well as L1 readers, find low non-minimal attached sentences more difficult to process than they do minimal attachment sentences. On the other hand, the length of the distance between the modificand and prepositional phrases does not affect processing performance. It was also found that the participants with a large WM capacity performed better than those with a small WM capacity, but they show the preference for minimal attachment regardless of WM capacity. This suggests that Japanese EFL learners, in the processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences with prepositional phrases, follow the Minimal Attachment Strategy regardless of WM capacity.