Volume 7-2 April 2011.

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Title
Foreign Language Learners' Processing of Relative Clause Ambiguity: A Relevance Theory Perspective

Authors
Sima Khezrlou (M.A.)
University of Tehran, Iran

Ali Akbar Khomeijani Farahani (Ph.D.)
University of Tehran, Iran

Fateme Layeghi (M.A.)
University of Tehran, Iran

Bio Data
Sima Khezrlou, M.A. in TEFL from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. Her major academic interests include SLA issues and psycholinguistics. She is currently involved in teaching English at foreign language teaching centers.

Ali Akbar Khomeijani Farahani, assistant professor of English and Linguistics in the English department of University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. His research interests include Discourse Analysis and Systematic Functional Linguistics. He has taught extensively in these areas in MA and PhD levels.

Fateme Layeghi, M.A. in TEFL from the University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran. Her major academic interests include ELT and SLA.

Abstract
This study explored the way adult Persian-speaking foreign language learners of English attempted to resolve ambiguities of relative clause type. Two groups of advanced (n=100) and intermediate (n=90) English female and male learners with Persian as their first language tried to resolve ambiguities in an off-line task. The study aimed to explore the learners' disambiguation of relative clause sentences linked by either of or with prepositions from relevance theory perspective. The results show that learners’ attachment preferences were largely influenced by the contextual effect and processing effort principles of relevance theory that have been claimed to influence sentence processing. The article also demonstrates that although the learners’ disambiguation preferences were influenced by the phrase-structure based locality principles (recency or predicate proximity) for the ambiguous sentences linked by of preposition, there was no evidence that they applied any phrase structure–based ambiguity resolution strategies of the same type to the interpretation of complex genitives linked by with antecedent. The Persian-speaking participants of different level of proficiency and gender differed significantly in terms of their disambiguation preferences. Results are further discussed.

Keywords: Relevance theory, Disambiguation, Relative clause ambiguity, Contextual condition, Non-contextual condition.