How is Chinese reading affected by under-specification and over-specification? Evidence from self-paced reading experiments

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

Guided by the theoretical frameworks of mental model construction in discourse processing and reference resolution in reading and using the noncumulative moving-window procedure, we conducted four reading experiments to examine how Chinese reading was affected by referential under-specification or over-specification. In each experiment, participants read 48 Chinese sentence pairs, each consisting of a context sentence and a target sentence. The context sentence mentioned either one or two referents and the referential expression in the target sentence was either a bare or a modified noun. In experiments 1/2, the modifier was a size adjective while in experiments 3/4, the modifier was a color adjective. The results of experiments 1/2 showed that the initial referring expression processing was unaffected by either under-specification or over-specification with a redundant size. Experiments 3/4 confirmed this finding, but also indicated that an over-specification with a color modifier actually facilitated referential processing. The results, while providing support for Fukumura and van Gompel's (2017) finding that referential processing is governed more by the lexico-semantic representations of the referring expressions than by Gricean expectations, also suggest that readers' mental model constructions and the unique features/processing patterns of the Chinese language may also affect referential processing.