Iranian English Language Bas Attitude toward Parsing of Garden-Path Sentences; Teachers and Non Teachers

Psycholinguistic ally looking at reading comprehension, reader’s process language one word at a time. Garden Path Sentences (GPSs) are part of the ambiguous sentences that are easily misunderstood even though they are all grammatical. Theories of sentence comprehension have addressed both initial parsing processes and mechanisms responsible for reanalysis. The purpose of this study was to compare the attitude of the two groups of participants in this study toward the GPSs when confronted in reading comprehension. The method employed in this research was a descriptive and a comparative one. The subjects of this study were Iranian English language BAs from the Khuzestan province, the South part of Iran, in two groups of 30, "school teachers" and " non-teachers". They were both male and female and their age ranged from 25-30 at the time of the study. A TOEFL test was administered at the beginning of the study, aiming at homogenizing the participants. The subjects were given 20 GPSs extracted from Nordquist in three phases with three different purposes. In the first phase of the experiment, they were asked to say whether the sentences are grammatical or not. Essentially as one hears or reads a sentence, his brain automatically begins to try to figure out what the next word or type of word is going to be. In the second phase, they were asked to rewrite their initial likely partial parse. There is, however, an interesting bit that arises when one is sure that a sentence is grammatically correct, but does not fit with the way his brain has parsed what it is heard already, so in the last stage, the final parse was asked. The findings obtained from Pearson correlation and t-test suggested that both groups were misled and there were no significant differences between the two in phases one and two. But there was a significant difference in the final parse of the two.