Abstract
A general fact about language is that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Recently, several self-paced reading studies have presented surprising evidence that object relatives in Chinese are easier to process than subject relatives. We carried out three self-paced reading experiments that attempted to replicate these results. Two of our three studies found a subject-relative preference, and the third study found an object-relative advantage. Using a random effects bayesian meta-analysis of fifteen studies (including our own), we show that the overall current evidence for the subject-relative advantage is quite strong (approximate posterior probability of a subject-relative advantage given the data: 78–80%). We argue that retrieval/integration based accounts would have difficulty explaining all three experimental results. These findings are important because they narrow the theoretical space by limiting the role of an important class of explanation—retrieval/integration cost—at least for relative clause processing in Chinese.
Highlights
One of the central concerns of sentence comprehension research has been to identify universal, that is, cross-linguistically applicable, constraints that determine online parsing difficulty
We investigated the processing of subject and object relatives in Chinese, and demonstrated that two of the three experiments we carried out are inconsistent with the claim that Chinese relativeclause processing difficulty can be explained by dependency distance
Distance-based accounts predict increased difficulty in subject relatives (SRs) at the head noun: in the Dependency Locality Theory [29], this is because, compared to the object relatives (ORs), one extra discourse referent intervenes in the SR between the head NP and the gap it is coindexed with; in the decay and interference-based account [57], the SR should be more difficult than the OR because the gap site is more distant in the SR than OR case and has decayed more and in addition suffers from retroactive interference due to the intervening object in the SR
Summary
One of the central concerns of sentence comprehension research has been to identify universal, that is, cross-linguistically applicable, constraints that determine online parsing difficulty. An example of a cross-linguistically consistent result concerns relative clause (RC) processing. The subject-preference extends to cross-linguistic second-language acquisition studies as well [18,19]. This universal processing pattern of RCs has inspired many explanations (see [20] for a comprehensive summary). Cross-linguistically, SRs are more common than ORs. For example, in the Brown corpus of the English Penn Treebank (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/ ̃treebank/) the frequency distribution of SRs versus ORs is 86% and 13% [22]; in the German NEGRA corpus [23], it is 74% and 26% [24]; and in the Chinese Treebank, 57.5% and 42.5% [20]. For all languages where this pattern holds, an SR advantage is predicted
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