Nayereh joodi
Abstract
This study attempted to answer the following questions: "Which constructions in Persian correspond to the conventional definition of sentences with the garden path effect? Moreover, based on the ideas of sentence processing, how these constructions can be classified in Persian?” Firstly, this paper ...
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This study attempted to answer the following questions: "Which constructions in Persian correspond to the conventional definition of sentences with the garden path effect? Moreover, based on the ideas of sentence processing, how these constructions can be classified in Persian?” Firstly, this paper described garden path sentences in English and introduced theoretical concepts and patterns related to sentence processing. After the examination of ambiguity and more particularly structural ambiguity, it was concluded that the Persian language has structures that match the English definition of the garden path sentences. Furthermore, structural ambiguity can also be considered as a type of sentence with the garden path effect. On the whole, Persian garden path sentences can be divided into two types: those with one correct grammatical reading and those with more than one reading due to syntactic or semantic reasons. Using the ideas from the field of sentence processing, it appears that the effective factors causing the garden path effect in Persian sentences are similar to those that yield this effect in English sentences. Finally, we argued for the importance of speech prosody and punctuation to eliminate ambiguities from written sentences.Keywords: syntactic processing, Garden path sentences, ambiguity, punctuation, prosody
Shahla Raghibdoust; Elahe Kamari
Abstract
Previous research showed that deaf individuals in compare to hearing ones perform weaker in syntactic processing. Therefore, they are expected to compensate for this defect through using their background knowledge. The aims of this study were to investigate the effect of deafness on the participants’ ...
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Previous research showed that deaf individuals in compare to hearing ones perform weaker in syntactic processing. Therefore, they are expected to compensate for this defect through using their background knowledge. The aims of this study were to investigate the effect of deafness on the participants’ ability to comprehend subject relative clauses, and to determine their strategies in comprehending the semantically plausible subject relative clauses and semantically implausible ones within the theoretical framework of Interactive-Compensatory Model (Stanovich, 1980). The performance of 4 profound deaf students in fifth grades as the experimental group and 4 healthy hearing students as the control group was studied in a cross-sectional research to evaluate their comprehension of semantically plausible subject relative clauses and semantically implausible ones. The findings of this research showed that there was no significant difference between the performance of the deaf and hearing participants in comprehending semantically plausible sentences (p>0/05). However, a significant difference between the performance of the two groups was observed with respect to their comprehension of semantically implausible sentences (p<0/05). Based on the analysis of the data, it was concluded that the difficulty that the deaf experimental group experienced in processing semantically implausible subject relative sentences can be attributed to their use of a top-down strategy in comprehending these syntactic structures.
