4 ms·

Weird, as a non-native and non-fluent english speaker, I don't suffer that effect.

• michael_dorfman 16y ago
  Really? How does that work? Do you read the entire sentence, before trying to parse the grammar? For example, when reading "The man returned to his house was happy", you don't provisionally interpret "The man returned to his house" as meaningful?
  • Sherlock 16y ago
    I suppose that i read the entire sentence before parsing it, just because i need a slight rational effort to decode it.
    • michael_dorfman 16y ago
      Interesting. I'm a native English speaker, living in a foreign country, so I spend most of my day working with a language I'm not completely fluent in, and I find I do the opposite-- I'm trying to put the meaning together word by word as the sentence unfolds, which makes reading things with long, Proustian sentences very difficult.
  • bodhi 16y ago
    I've just had a similar conversation with my Japanese wife, and she pointed out that with many of the words that can be interpreted as nouns or verbs by fluent speakers, she only knows one interpretation, so she misses the 'garden' path that a fluent speaker would take. I suspect that it also applies to transitive vs. intransitive verbs. So to contrive your example, a fluent speaker would know both the transitive and intransitive uses of "returned" and, preferring the intransitive interpretation ("I returned home"), would reach your conclusion. But if a non-fluent speaker only knew -- or was stronger with -- the transitive version ("I returned the book"), they would arrive at the correct interpretation. I hope that makes sense, it was a lot harder to explain than I anticipated!