A Study on the NP Attachment Preference of Tagalog-Dominant and Chinese-Dominant Bilinguals

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the Noun Phrase (NP) attachment preference of English L2 learners in the Philippines when they process ambiguous relative clauses. To this end, 29 bilinguals at a private university in Manila were recruited, and a language background survey was conducted. Based on the survey results, they were divided into Filipino-dominant and Chinese-dominant groups. Then, they were asked to undergo a grammaticality judgment test to determine their English proficiency. Finally, a questionnaire was administered composed of 40 relative clauses containing of or with conditions. Results revealed that contrary to predictions, both the Filipino-dominant and the Chinese-dominant bilinguals favor NP1 over NP2 in both conditions. It is argued that even advanced learners tend to transfer parsing heuristics from their first language or use processing mechanisms similar to the language they are immersed in.