Fatemeh Nemati

Sentence processing involves employing different linguistic and non-linguistic cues to comprehend a sequence of words and the way they have organized in a sentence. Event knowledge and syntactic experience have been considered as two of the influential factors during sentence interpretation. This study sought to investigate the impacts that both event knowledge (operationalized as congruity) and syntactic experience can exert on the reading times of Persian learners of English. We exploited the sentences manipulated based on congruity (among the agent, the patient, and the context) as well as similarity to/ difference from the first language linguistic experience (of verbs). In self-paced reading experiments, the reading times of three critical regions of each sentence including the patient noun and two words following that were recorded. Mixed-effect regression and ANOVA were employed in order to analyze reading times. Multi-level analyses exhibited that congruent items were easier to read than incongruent ones due to taking the shortest reading times on the two words after the patient when these two words were consistent with the event evoked by the agent and the patient. Also, the analyses revealed that sentences containing different verbs from the L1 took the most time to be processed by readers. Thus, syntactic similarity to L1 can be facilitative while comprehenders read and interpret a text. Hence, the knowledge of the surrounding entities, objects, and events as well as the syntactic experience of the first language and the target language of a bilingual, are regarded as accessible sources of information that readers exploit when they are reading and processing sentences of a text.