Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution among Moroccan Learners of English as a Foreign Language

ABSTRACT : The paper in hands examines syntactic ambiguity resolution among Moroccan EFL learners. It focuses mainly on prepositional phrase (PP) attachment preferences in syntactically ambiguous English sentences. It tries to explore whether Moroccan EFL learners prefer noun phrase (NP) or verb phrase (VP) attachment when they interpret syntactically ambiguous sentences. A quantitative design was employed with 72 Moroccan university students who completed a Google Forms questionnaire consisting of 10 ambiguous sentences. The results show a clear dominance of VP attachment in the vast majority of the ten items. These findings suggest that learners rely mainly on semantic plausibility and real-world knowledge rather than syntactic structure in the process of parsing ambiguity.

KEYWORDS : syntactic ambiguity, PP attachment, sentence processing, VP/NP attachment