Abstract
This study addresses the question of whether native Mandarin Chinese speakers process and comprehend subject-extracted relative clauses (SRC) more readily than object-extracted relative clauses (ORC) in Mandarin Chinese. Presently, this has been a hotly debated issue, with various studies producing contrasting results. Using two eye-tracking experiments with ambiguous and unambiguous RCs, this study shows that both ORCs and SRCs have different processing requirements depending on the locus and time course during reading. The results reveal that ORC reading was possibly facilitated by linear/temporal integration and canonicity. On the other hand, similarity-based interference made ORCs more difficult, and expectation-based processing was more prominent for unambiguous ORCs. Overall, RC processing in Mandarin should not be broken down to a single ORC (dis)advantage, but understood as multiple interdependent factors influencing whether ORCs are either more difficult or easier to parse depending on the task and context at hand.
Highlights
When comparing sentence processing strategies between languages, several cross-linguistic differences have been observed, making it unclear whether strategies differ across languages
While accuracy for the plausibility task denoted whether the participant accurately judged the experimental Relative clauses (RC) as plausible, accuracy for the verification task indicated whether the participant accurately judged the probe to be true/correct or false/incorrect
In an effort to further previous eye-tracking studies that used either ambiguous relative clauses in Mandarin or syntactic cues to attenuate ambiguity, the current study shows that canonicity and linear/ temporal-based integrations metrics support an objectextracted relative clauses (ORC) advantage
Summary
When comparing sentence processing strategies between languages, several cross-linguistic differences have been observed, making it unclear whether strategies differ across languages. Competing models make dichotomous predictions for a certain language, for example, when processing relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese ( “Mandarin”). In Mandarin, past studies are divided on their support for different contending models. We employ eye-tracking to empirically investigate several relative clause processing models within different contexts to explore their interrelationships. We briefly introduce the topic of relative clauses, followed by several available processing accounts, and discuss how these models might function in Mandarin.
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