Читать книгу The Concise Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics - Carol A. Chapelle - Страница 137

Sentence comprehension entails the incremental integration of word meanings in such a way that an integrated “chunk” reflects the overall meaning of larger text units, such as phrase and clause. The integration process, often referred to as “syntactic parsing,” involves two major operations: phrase construction through word meaning integration and case assignments to the constructed phrases. To illustrate, the sentence “Nancy tapped the man with the cane” allows two interpretations regarding the cane holder. If the phrase “with the cane” is taken as a modifier of the verb “tapped,” Nancy is the cane holder. If, on the other hand, the phrase is interpreted to modify “the man,” the cane should be in his hand. Hence, decisions regarding phrase attachment have major semantic consequences, and syntactic knowledge is integral to this process.

Because syntactic structures vary from one language to another, the learner must understand how phrases are constructed, and cases are assigned to the phrases in a new language. It has been reported that syntactic knowledge significantly contributes to reading performance among school‐age second language learners (e.g., Nagy, McClure, & Mir, 1997; Verhoeven, 2000). Second language reading studies have shown that syntactic knowledge is an equal, if not better, predictor of reading comprehension than vocabulary knowledge among college language learners (Jeon, 2011; Shin & Kim, 2012; Kim & Cho, 2015).