Investigating the Effects of Syntactic and Semantic Awareness in the Sentence Comprehension of EFL Learners

This study investigated how English semantic and syntactic awareness contribute to the sentence comprehension of beginner, intermediate, and advanced EFL learners. Consequently, 188 Iranian EFL learners were recruited for the study and, pertinent to their English proficiency levels, were divided into three groups. To elucidate the possible contribution of semantic and syntactic awareness for comprehending English sentences, five sets of sentences were constructed controlling the frequency, length and difficulty of their comprising words: 20 syntactically correct / semantically incorrect, 20 syntactically incorrect / semantically correct, 20 syntactically / semantically incorrect, 20 syntactically / semantically correct, and finally 20 Garden-Path sentences (which are both semantically and syntactically correct but difficult to comprehend by the first attempt). With the aid of a software application (Com-Chron) designed specifically for this study on the UX platform, the participants’ comprehension was checked both in terms of their success-rate and their reaction-time. Through a multiple-choice online task, the participants were asked to select the option which showed the correct understanding of the constructed sentence in 30 seconds. Statistical analyses revealed that semantically-incorrect sentences were the most challenging and syntactically-incorrect sentences were the least demanding for the participants of three proficiency levels. The findings affirmed the dominance of semantics over syntax when it came to the comprehension abilities of EFL learners across different English proficiency levels.