Exploring the effects of animacy and verb type on the processing asymmetry between SRC and ORC among Chinese EFL learners

Abstract

This study investigates the production and comprehension of subject relative clause (SRC) and object relative clause (ORC) in English by Chinese EFL learners. Two experiments are reported. Using a sentence completion task to elicit the production of relative clauses (RCs), Experiment 1 examined the distributional patterns of SRC and ORC and showed that SRC was more frequently distributed than ORC. In addition, animacy and verb type had effects on the asymmetric distribution of SRC and ORC. Using a word-by-word moving-window self-paced reading paradigm, Experiment 2 further compared reading times (RTs) of SRC and ORC containing different animacy and verb type configurations. Reading difficulties in ORC were observed, and comprehension difficulties of certain configurations of animacy and verb type just mirrored their frequencies in the first experiment. Taken together, the processing asymmetry of SRC and ORC has been observed in both comprehension and production processes. Comprehension difficulties are believed to stem from the asymmetric distributions of sentence patterns involving different animacy and verb type configurations. These findings suggest that comprehension difficulties are correlated with the distributional patterns, which could provide strong support to the Production-Distribution-Comprehension account, the experience-based approach applicable in language acquisition.