Thematic orders and the comprehension of subject-extracted relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese.

Chien-Jer Charles Lin

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01255

Abstract

This study investigates the comprehension of three kinds of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRs) in Mandarin Chinese: standard SRs, relative clauses involving the disposal ba construction (“disposal SRs”), and relative clauses involving the long passive bei constructions (“passive SRs”). In a self-paced reading experiment, the regions before the relativizer (where the sentential fragments are temporarily ambiguous) showed reading patterns consistent with expectation-based incremental processing: standard SRs, with the highest constructional frequency and the least complex syntactic structure, were processed faster than the other two variants. However, in the regions after the relativizer and the head noun where the existence of a relative clause is unambiguously indicated, a top-down global effect of thematic ordering was observed: passive SRs, whose thematic role order conforms to the canonical thematic order of Chinese, were read faster than both the standard SRs and the disposal SRs. Taken together, these results suggest that two expectation-based processing factors are involved in the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses, including both the structural probabilities of pre-relativizer constituents and the overall surface thematic orders in the relative clauses.

Highlights

Relative clauses have been of great theoretical interest to sentence processing researchers, with decades of research comparing the processing of subject-extracted relative clauses ( “SRs”) to that of object-extracted relative clauses ( “ORs”)
Two contrasts were defined comparing the passive SRs with the standard SRs and comparing the passive SRs with the disposal SRs
The reading time data for three sub-types of Chinese SRs reported in the present study supported two processes that are involved in the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses

Summary

Introduction

Relative clauses have been of great theoretical interest to sentence processing researchers, with decades of research comparing the processing of subject-extracted relative clauses ( “SRs”) to that of object-extracted relative clauses ( “ORs”). The first group of theories focuses on the consumption of working memory in constructing filler-gap dependencies, suggesting that SRs in English are easier to comprehend (with shorter reading times and greater comprehension accuracies) because, relative to ORs, less working memory is required to process them. Within these integration-based theories, a number of proposals have been made as to precisely how the relevant processing costs are computed. The activation and cue-based retrieval theory (Van Dyke and Lewis, 2003; Lewis and Vasishth, 2005) on the other hand takes into consideration the lexical items intervening a filler and a gap as contributors to activation and retrieval

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion