An ERP Study of the Object Preference in Processing Chinese Relative Clauses

Abstract

Through an event-related potential (ERP) study, we examined the processing mechanisms of four types of Chinese (Mandarin) relative clauses (RCs), namely subject subject-extracted relative clause (SSR), subject object-extracted relative clause (SOR), object subject-extracted relative clause (OSR), and object object-extracted relative clause (OOR) to test the universality and language specificity of RC comprehension processes. The results of this study support a preference for object-extracted RCs modifying both the subject and object of a sentence, i.e., SORs and OORs. In particular, ERP results showed stronger P600 effects in the RC region for SSRs compared with SORs, which we argue reflects a canonical word order theory. Stronger N400 effects were observed for verbs compared with nouns, reflecting easier understanding for nouns. ERP results from the matrix clause object and the relativizer ' de” showed stronger P600 effects in SSRs compared with SORs, suggesting thematic structure effects on syntactic construction and the processing preference of the whole sentence.