THE EFFECTS OF AGE, PRESENTATION MODE (ONLINE, OFFLINE), AND SEGMENTATION OF AMBIGUOUS SENTENCES ON ATTACHMENT PREFERENCES OF FEMALE EFL LEARNERS

One kind of structural ambiguity is in sentences including two determiner phrases (DP) that are followed by a relative clause (RC). One example of this type of ambiguity is "Somebody shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony". Speakers of different languages attribute RC either to DP1 or DP2. The goal of this study was to investigate the relationship between participants' age and participants' attachment preferences, as well as different ways of presenting the material (i.e., offline vs. online) on the attachment preferences. This study also aims to see if the segmentation of experimental sentences plays any role in participant attachment preferences. To this end, a sample of 50 female native speakers of Persian ranging between 15 to 25 years participated in this study. The instruments used in the present research include an offline sentence acceptability judgment test and main tests that included the first main test, offline test, online complete presentation (timed), and an online segment-by-segment sentence. For the analysis of data t-tests and ANOVA were used. The statistics showed that participants' age affects attachment preferences, and adolescents have a tendency toward DP1 selection. Different modes of presenting ambiguous sentences also affected the results; presenting materials in a self-paced online method leads to a significant difference other two modes. Finally, segmentation plays a role in the attachment preference of RC and in resolving ambiguous sentences. The results showed that students had a preference for segmented presentation rather than a holistic mode of presentation.  Article visualizations: