Chinese Relative Clauses Research Articles

The Continuity of Head Nouns: The Difference in Relativizability between Korean and Chinese

The Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy cannot explain the difference in relativizability between Chinese and Korean in authentic discourse. Korean exhibits a higher preference for relativization compared to Chinese and this article aims to account for this difference from the perspective of topic continuity. Specifically, the continuity of head nouns within relative clauses is stronger in Korean than in Chinese. By analyzing the parameters of referential distance and potential interference, this study finds that the head nouns in Korean relative clauses display a broader range on the continuum of continuity compared to those in Chinese relative clauses. Furthermore, the difference in the strength of continuity of head nouns between Chinese and Korean relative clauses is attributed to the typological distinction between the Component-Integral Languages and Component-Metonymic Languages postulated within the framework of the Event-Domain Cognitive Model.

How semantics works in Chinese relative clause processing: insights from eye tracking.

Recent years have witnessed much research on semantic analysis and syntactic anatomy in ordinary language processing. However, it is still a matter of considerable debate about when and how the semantic integration of single word meanings works and interacts with syntax during on-line comprehension. This study, in an eye-tracking paradigm, took 38 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese as the participants and took Chinese relative clauses as stimuli to figure out the functions of semantics by investigating the conditioning semantic factors influencing and governing the word order variation of Chinese relative clauses during different processing stages. Accordingly, this study manipulated two syntactic variables, i.e., relative clause type and the position of the numeral-classifier sequence (NCL) in the relative clause, as well as a semantic variable, i.e., the abstractness of the head noun that the relative clause modified. Specifically, the study addressed two questions: (1) when semantics is activated and interacts with syntax and (2) how semantics affects syntax during the time course of Chinese relative clause processing. The results indicated that: (1) Semantics was activated and interacted with syntax during the early and late processing stages of Chinese relative clauses, which challenged the sequential order of syntactic and semantic processes, and supported the claims of the Concurrent Processing Model. (2) The syntactic order of the Chinese relative clause was affected by the semantic information of the head noun that the clause modified. Object-extraction relative clauses (ORCs) had a conjunction preference for the order "an object relative clause preceding the numeral-classifier sequence and the head noun." Instead, the subject-extraction relative clause (SRC) which modified a concrete noun (CN) had a co-occurrence preference for the order "numeral-classifier sequence preceding the subject relative clause and the head noun," while the subject-extraction relative clause which modified an abstract noun (AN) had a co-occurrence preference for the order "subject relative clause preceding the numeral-classifier sequence and the head noun." The findings of this study were evaluated in light of the perspectives of truth value semantics of the syntactic components, the semantic compatibility of numeral-classifier sequence and its modified noun as well as the discourse functions of outer modifier nominals and inner modifier nominals.

The role of resumption in the acquisition of European Portuguese prepositional relative clauses by Chinese learners

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the target language). Results of an oral production task and two online acceptability judgment tasks indicated that resumption does not transfer from the native language, and that Chinese learners of European Portuguese employ movement structures to produce and process relative clauses. Additionally, results showed that resumptive pronouns do not rescue or ameliorate ungrammatical extractions from islands, contrary to what is traditionally assumed in grammatical theory. This finding was kept constant across participants, native and non-native. Overall, we conclude that second language speakers are able to select and reassemble movement features in their non-native language and use similar processing mechanisms as native speakers to analyse island configurations.

What Memory-Load Interference Tasks Tell Us about Spoken Relative Clause Processing.

The relationship between working memory (WM) and language processing has been extensively investigated in cognitive research. Previous studies mostly obtain evidence from measuring the involvement of WM in complex syntactic structures reported with well-established processing asymmetry, e.g., relative clauses (RCs) in English. Rarely considered is the role of WM in language whose RC processing asymmetrypresents conflicting results, e.g., Chinese. This study addresses the research gap. Three experiments with a self-paced listening paradigm interfered with concurrent digit-load and lexical-decision interference were conductedon subject-extracted RCs (SRC) and object-extracted RCs (ORC). Listening times show no disparity between SRCs and ORCs, nor iseitherSRC or ORC processing more affected by syntactic complexity at comparable positions under each condition. Nevertheless, the post-sentence comprehension shows greater impairment in SRCs than ORCs. The results that memory load interfering does not differentially impair the availability of WM resources used for Chinese RC processing provide evidence for the specialization role of working memory. The findings demonstrate a dynamic, fluctuating wave pattern for Chinese RC processing. We arguethatthere is no RC processing asymmetry in Chinese.

중국어와 일본어의 상대절 마커의 특성 및 관련 통사론적 문제에 관한 연구 - 언어 유형학의 관점에서 -

본 연구의 목적은 언어유형학의 시야에 있다 다음은 중국어 일본어 관계절의 표기 유형, 출현 위치 및 표기 기능의 유사점과 차이점을 비교하고 관계절의 표기에 따른 구문 및 의미론적 문제를 논의한다. 현대 일본어는 연체형을 관계절의 표기로 하고, 중국어는 구조조사 "의"로 한다. 일본어 관계절은 속격 등 명사 수식어의 표기와는 달리 언어 공통성에 더 부합하며, 중국어의 경우 명사·대명사·관계절에 상관없이 명사를 수식하기 위해 통일된 표기를 사용하는 경우는 흔치 않다. 관계절 표기의 기능과 관련하여 중·일 양 언어의 관계절 표기는 모두 중심어가 절 서술어에서 작용하는 구문 성분을 나타내는 데 사용할 수 없지만, 일본어 관계절 표기는 관계절 표기를 표시하는 것 외에도 시체를 나타내는 데 사용되며 중국어 관계절 표기의 기능은 비교적 단순하다. 중·일 양 언어 관계절 표기에도 공통성이 있다. 중국어·일본어의 관계절은 모두 중심어 앞에 위치하기 때문에 표기가 중심어와 관계절 서술어 사이의 구문 관계를 식별할 수 없기 때문에 관계절의 관할을 결정할 수 없고 동위 어절과 동일한 구조를 채택하는 등의 문제가 발생한다. The purpose of this study is to compare the similarities and differences between Chinese and Japanese relative clauses in terms of the types, positions and functions of markers, and to explore the syntactic and semantic issues arising from the markers of relative clauses in the context of linguistic typology. In modern Japanese, the marker of the relative clause is the conjunctive form, while in Chinese, it is the structural auxiliary "de". In Japanese, the marker for the relative clause is different from that for noun modifiers such as the genitive case, which is more in line with linguistic commonality; in Chinese, the marker "de" is used uniformly for nouns, pronouns, and relative clauses to modify nouns, which is not uncommon in such languages. In terms of the function of relative clause markers, both Chinese and Japanese relative clause markers cannot be used to indicate the syntactic component of the central clause in the subordinate predicate, but Japanese relative clause markers are used to indicate the tense and aspect in addition to the relative clause, while Chinese relative clause markers have a single function. There are also commonalities between Chinese and Japanese in relative clause markers. Since the markers are located in front of the central clause, they cannot identify the syntactic relationship between the central clause and the predicate of the relative clause, which makes it impossible to determine the domain of the relative clause and adopt the same structure as the appositive clause, etc.

핵심명사의 통사적 위치가 한국인 학습자의 중국어 주격/목적격 관계절 처리에 미치는 영향

This study examines the acquisition situation of Chinese relative clause phrases by Korean learners through a self-paced reading task. This study aims to analyze three parts. First, The cognitive processing characteristics of Korean learners of different Chinese level groups when they process and comprehend Chinese subjective and objective relative clauses. Second, the effect of the syntactic position of head nouns on the cognitive processing of Chinese subjective and objective relative clauses. Third, the universal applicability of the representative second language relative clause acquisition theory hypothesis. In this study, two-way ANOVA was performed by dividing the within-subject of the experiment into different relative clause syntax types and between-subjects into a high-level group and a low-level group. The results showed that there were some differences between the high-level group and the lower-level group in the processing of Chinese subjective-objective relative clause sentences. These differences appeared in the reaction times of the experiments. The reaction time for each experimental sentence in the low-level group was much longer than that in the high-level group. In addition, the low-level group exhibited cognitive information processing characteristics that were affected by canonical word order, which is “NVN”, and exhibited the “garden path effect” when processing relative clauses. However, the high-level group showed a pattern of processing sentences relying on the “filler-gap dependencies”clue. Therefore it was found that as the learner’s second language level improved, the dependence on syntactic information increased when gradually acquiring procedural knowledge and understanding sentences. In addition, through the analysis of related data, it was found that the low-level group was less affected by the syntactic positional factors of the head noun, and there was no preference between the Chinese subjective relative clause and the objective relative clause. However, the high-level group showed the processing advantage of SRC (subjective relative clause) located in the subject position of the main clause. The results support the “frequency hypothesis”, “word order typicality hypothesis”, “structural distance hypothesis”, and the “integrated competition model,” consistent with the existing second language acquistion theories.

Factors affecting English-speaking learners’ acquisition of Chinese relative clauses with demonstrative classifier phrases

Abstract The current empirical research aimed to investigate native English-speaking learners’ acquisition of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) by conducting two studies. Study I explored the participants’ performance on gapped and gapless relative clauses (RCs) and their interpretation of demonstrative classifier (DCL)-relative clauses. Study II further investigated the participants’ interpretation of DCL-first and DCL-second RCs and discussed contextual effect. Different tasks were designed in the two studies: a sentence-unscrambling (SU) task and an acceptability judgement (AJ) task in Study I; and an interpretation (IT) task in Study II. A total of 20 L2 learners and 20 native speakers of Mandarin participated in our research. The overall results obtained from Study I revealed that gapped RCs were easier to produce and accept than gapless RCs, and learner performance was influenced by DCL position. Moreover, the L2 learners’ L1 knowledge was found to affect their production, but the task effect was not significant. In Study II, DCL-first RCs were found to be as difficult as DCL-second RCs for the L2 learners to interpret. The non-restrictive and restrictive interpretations of DCL-first RCs were found to be much more comprehensible. Finally, the L2 learners’ interpretation of RCs having DCL phrases in different positions showed a tendency of a contextual effect.

Subject Advantage in L1-English Learners’ Production of Chinese Relative Clauses

This study investigated whether L1-English Chinese learners show a subject preference in their oral production of Chinese relative clauses (RCs) and whether they show animacy effects. We conducted a picture-based elicited production experiment that compared subject and object RCs, varying the object animacy between animate and inanimate. The results from thirty learners showed more targetlike performance in subject RCs than in object RCs, both at group and individual levels, regardless of object animacy. Error analyses revealed that more object RCs were converted into subject RCs than vice versa. These results point toward a clear subject preference despite conflicted findings in previous research on RCs in Chinese as a foreign language. Animacy influenced subject and object RCs alike: both types were easier to produce when featuring an inanimate object. We suggested similarity-based interference or distribution-based effects to account for this finding.

Effects of L1 Transfer Are Profound, Yet Native-Like Processing Strategy Is Attainable: Evidence From Advanced Learners' Production of Complex L2 Chinese Structures.

English as a verb-medial language has a short-before-long preference, whereas Korean and Japanese as verb-final languages show a long-before-short preference. In second language (L2) research, little is known regarding how L1 processing strategies affect the ultimate attainment of target structures. Existing work has shown that native speakers of Chinese strongly prefer to utter demonstrative-classifier (DCL) phrases first in subject-extracted relatives (DCL-SR-N) and DCLs second in object-extracted relatives (OR-DCL-N). But it remains unknown whether L2 learners with typologically different language backgrounds are able to acquire native-like strategies, and how they deviate from native speakers or even among themselves. Using a phrase-assembly task, we investigated advanced L2-Chinese learners whose L1s were English, Korean, and Japanese, because English lacks individual classifiers and has postnominal relative clause (RC), whereas Korean and Japanese have individual classifiers and prenominal RCs. Results showed that the English and Korean groups deviated from the native controls’ asymmetric pattern, but the Japanese group approximated native-like performance. Furthermore, compared to the English group, the Korean and Japanese groups favored the DCL-second configuration in SRs and ORs. No differences were found between the Korean and Japanese groups. Overall, our findings suggest that L1 processing strategies play an overarching role in L2 acquisition of asymmetric positioning of DCLs in Chinese RCs.

Processing Chinese relative clauses in context by Italian L3 learners

The present study investigates third language (L3) learners’ processing of Chinese subject and object relative clauses in a supportive context. Using a self-paced reading task, we tested native Italian L3 learners of Mandarin Chinese and native Chinese speakers. The results showed that the L3 learners read significantly more slowly than the native speakers in all the target regions. Also, in the head noun region, they read object relative clauses significantly more slowly compared to subject relative clauses, indicating a preference for the latter. By contrast, for the native speakers, no significant differences were observed between subject and object relative clauses in any of the target regions. The L3 learners’ performance offers support for the Structural Distance Hypothesis over the Dependency Locality Theory, and the contrast between the two populations indicates that context is at play in the processing of relative clauses.

Postnominal relative clauses in Chinese

Abstract In contrast to well-studied prenominal relative clauses (RCs) in Chinese, little has been known about postnominal RCs that are non-canonical but existent in spoken Chinese. Focusing on Standard Mandarin, this paper examines in a large-scale spoken corpus the distributional patterns of postnominal RCs. Using distribution patterns of prenominal RCs in existing corpus studies as benchmarks, we show that postnominal RCs in our spoken corpus of Standard Mandarin tend to modify sentential objects more frequently than sentential subjects, and that they are likely to be short, with extremely rare presence of aspect markers. Based on these patterns, we propose that postnominal RCs in Standard Mandarin are mostly afterthoughts, motivated by information structure of spoken languages and word order principles. To better understand their general coverage, we further investigate postnominal RCs in Chinese dialects using available resources, including Yue, Min, Xiang, and Wu, followed by a raw comparison of cross-dialectal similarities and differences. We conclude that postnominal RCs in Chinese are similarly motivated, but their degrees of grammaticalization vary.

Both activation and deactivation of functional networks support increased sentence processing costs

The research on the neural correlates underlying the language system has gradually moved away from the traditional Broca-Wernicke framework to a network perspective in the past 15 years. Language processing is found to be supported by the co-activation of both core and peripheral brain regions. However, the dynamic co-activation patterns of these brain regions serving different language functions remain to be fully revealed. The present functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study focused on sentence processing at different syntactic complexity levels to examine how the co-activation of different brain networks will be modulated by increased processing costs. Chinese relative clauses were used to probe the two dimensions of syntactic complexity: embeddedness (left-branching vs. center-embedded) and gap-filler dependency (subject-gap vs. object-gap) using the general linear model (GLM) approach, independent component analysis (ICA) and graph theoretical analysis. In contrast to localized activation revealed by the GLM approach, ICA identified more extensive networks both positively and negatively correlated with the task. We found that the posterior default mode network was anti-correlated to the gap-filler integration costs with increased deactivation for the left-branching object relative clauses compared to subject relative clauses, suggesting the involvement of this network in leveraging the cognitive resources based on the complexity level of the language task. Concurrent activation and deactivation of networks were found to be associated with the higher costs induced by center-embedding and its interaction with gap-filler integration. The graph theoretical analysis further unveiled that center-embeddedness imposed more attentional demand on the subject relative clause, as characterized by its higher degree and strength in the ventral attention network, and higher processing costs of syntactic reanalysis on the object relative clause, as characterized by increased intermodular connections of the language network with other networks. The results suggest that network activation and deactivation profiles are modulated by different dimensions of syntactic complexity to serve the higher demand of creating a coherent semantic representation.

Brain connectivity in the left frontotemporal network dynamically modulated by processing difficulty: Evidence from Chinese relative clauses.

Although the connection between the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and the left superior temporal gyrus (LSTG) has been found to be essential for the comprehension of relative clause (RC) sentences, it remains unclear how the LIFG and the LSTG interact with each other, especially during the processing of Chinese RC sentences with different processing difficulty. This study thus conducted a 2 × 2 (modifying position × extraction position) factorial analyses to examine how these two factors influences regional brain activation. The results showed that, regardless of the modifying position, greater activation in the LIFG was consistently elicited in Chinese subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) with non-canonical word order than object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) with canonical word order, implying that the LIFG subserving the ordering process primarily contributes to the processing of information with increased integration demands due to the non-canonical sequence. Moreover, the directional connection between the LIFG and the LSTG appeared to be modulated by different modifying positions. When the RC was at the subject-modifying position, the effective connectivity from the LIFG to the LSTG was dominantly activated for sentence comprehension; whereas when the RC was at the object-modifying position thus being more difficult, it might be the feedback mechanism from the LSTG back to the LIFG that took place in sentence processing. These findings reveal that brain activation in between the LIFG and the LSTG may be dynamically modulated by different processing difficulty and suggest the relative specialization but extensive collaboration involved in the LIFG and the LSTG for sentence comprehension.

Enhanced left inferior frontal to left superior temporal effective connectivity for complex sentence comprehension: fMRI evidence from Chinese relative clause processing

Previous studies investigating the processing of complex sentences have demonstrated the involvement of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and left superior temporal gyrus (LSTG), which might subserve ordering and storage of linguistic components, respectively, for sentence comprehension. However, how these brain regions are interconnected, especially during the processing of Chinese sentences, need to be further explored. In this study, the neural network supporting the comprehension of Chinese relative clause was identified. Both the LIFG and LSTG exhibited higher activation in processing subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) than object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs). Moreover, a Granger causality analysis revealed that the effective connectivity from the LIFG to LSTG was significant only when participants read Chinese SRCs, which were argued to be more difficult than ORCs. Contrary to the observations of an SRC advantage in most other languages, the present results provide clear neuroimaging evidence for an ORC advantage in Chinese.

Preference for Object Relative Clauses in Chinese Sentence Comprehension: Evidence From Online Self-Paced Reading Time.

Most prior studies have reported that subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) are easier to process than object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs). However, whether such an SRC preference is universal across different languages remains an open question. Several reports from Chinese have provided conflicting results; thus, in the present study, we conducted two self-paced reading experiments to examine the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses. The results demonstrated a clear ORC preference that Chinese ORCs were easier to comprehend than Chinese SRCs. These findings were most compatible with the prediction of the integration cost account, which claims that the processing difference between SRCs and ORCs arises at the point of dependency formation. The ORC preference in Chinese poses a challenge to the universality of the SRC preference assumed by the structural distance hypothesis and highlights the values of cross-linguistic research.

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks.

Working memory (WM) plays a central role in the comprehension of complex sentences. Its function in the processing of spoken complex sentences is especially evident because spoken complex sentence processing is memory-intensive. The dual-modal interference paradigm has been used to examine how the WM system is involved in complex syntactic processing. This article presents two exemplar experiments involving auditory processing with either intra- or extrasentential interferences. In the first experiment, auditory stimuli [spoken-Chinese relative clause (RC) sentences with two syntactic types: subject-gapped (SRC) vs. object-gapped (ORC)] are interfered with via a visually presented lexical decision task within a sentence and manipulated using three different interference timepoints. In the second experiment, the same auditory stimuli, presented via an auditory window moving technique, are interfered with via a visually presented digital recall task beyond the sentence and manipulated using three digital memory loads. By assessing how the primary task of comprehending the RC sentences is affected by the secondary task, we can tackle the controversial issue concerning Chinese RC processing asymmetry. Our results reveal different patterns of RC processing compared to those reported in previous studies. Experiment 1 manifests no clear RC processing advantages in either SRC or ORC; however, a preference for ORC is observed at the ends of sentences, and a preference for SRC is found at the main verb site. Likewise, Experiment 2 presents a dynamic pattern. Under a no-digit load, SRCs show processing advantages in the RC marker region. However, under higher-digit-load interference, ORCs show processing advantages in the same region. These results lead to the conjecture that no obvious or intrinsic processing asymmetry exists in the processing of Chinese RCs. Using the approach of assessing specific interference during syntactic processing, these experiments demonstrate future research applications that explore the processing metrics of spoken sentences involving working memory.

The Role of Animacy and Structural Information in Relative Clause Attachment: Evidence From Chinese.

We report one production and one comprehension experiment investigating the effect of animacy in relative clause attachment in Chinese. Experiment 1 involved a fill-in-the-blank task that manipulated the order of an animate noun phrase in a complex NP construction. The results showed that while low attachment responses exceeded high attachment responses overall (cf. Shen, 2006), a tendency exists to attach a relative clause to an animate NP in Chinese (cf. Desmet et al., 2002). Experiment 2 used a rating task to examine the interplay between animacy and structural information by manipulating the order of the animate NP as well as the relative clause type (i.e., subject vs. object relative clauses). The results showed that the animate NP modification tendency found in Experiment 1 was limited to subject-relative clauses and that no animacy-related effect was found with object-relative clauses. These results are incompatible with purely structural parsing strategies such as Late Closure (Frazier, 1987) and the Predicate Proximity Principle (Gibson et al., 1996). Instead, the current results suggest that attachment ambiguity resolution in Chinese relative clauses is sensitive to animacy as well as structural information.

When embeddedness matters: Electrophysiological evidence for the role of head noun position in Chinese relative clause processing

Abstract This ERP study of Chinese subject- and object-modifying relative clauses (RCs) aimed at investigating how sentence context (embeddedness) temporally interacted with relativization in terms of processing load. In stead of adotping a static view of processing costs of RCs, we focused on the dynamic modulation of processing load by sentence context at two critical words–the relative marker de and head noun. Using cluster-based permutation analyses of ERPs, our study found an early relativization effect (110–220 ms) followed by an embeddedness effect (411–441 ms) and a late interaction effect (540–620 ms) at the relative marker de. The main effect of relativization as an early left anterior negativity suggests a transitory processing advantage of subject-relativization independent of sentence context. The sentence context was processed just 410 ms after word onset as a late left-lateralized anterior negativity for the center-embedded RCs, indicating increased working memory load introduced by sentence context constraints. A late centro-posterior positivity registered for object-relativization RCs with preceding sentence context due to structural reanalysis. An early anterior negativity (73–123 ms) reflecting the embeddedness effect at the head noun suggests the complexity of information encoded in phrase markers when semantic contents of verb arguments are instantiated. Our results indicate that it is necessary to adjust the account of RC processing beyond a universal processing advantage for subject-relativization to integrate the effects of sentence context cross-linguistically.

Is There a Processing Preference for Object Relative Clauses in Chinese? Evidence From ERPs.

A consistent finding across head-initial languages, such as English, is that subject relative clauses (SRCs) are easier to comprehend than object relative clauses (ORCs). However, several studies in Mandarin Chinese, a head-final language, revealed the opposite pattern, which might be modulated by working memory (WM) as suggested by recent results from self-paced reading performance. In the present study, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded when participants with high and low WM spans (measured by forward digit span and operation span tests) read Chinese ORCs and SRCs. The results revealed an N400-P600 complex elicited by ORCs on the relativizer, whose magnitude was modulated by the WM span. On the other hand, a P600 effect was elicited by SRCs on the head noun, whose magnitude was not affected by the WM span. These findings paint a complex picture of relative clause processing in Chinese such that opposing factors involving structural ambiguities and integration of filler-gap dependencies influence processing dynamics in Chinese relative clauses.

When Structure Competes with Semantics: Reading Chinese Relative Clauses

An ongoing debate in Chinese psycholinguistics is whether subject-relative clauses or object-relative clauses are more difficult to process. The current study asks what happens when structure and plausibility are pitted against each other in Chinese relative clause processing. Chinese relative clause structures and semantic plausibility were manipulated to create both plausible and implausible versions of subject- and object-relative clauses. This method has been used in other languages (e.g., English) to elicit thematic role reversal comprehension errors. Importantly, these errors—as well as online processing difficulties—are especially frequent in implausible versions of dispreferred (noncanoncial) structures. If one relative clause structure in Chinese is highly dispreferred, the structural factor and plausibility factor should interact additively. If, however, the structures are relatively equally difficult to process, then there should be only a main effect of plausibility. Sentence reading times as well as analyses on lexical interest areas revealed that Chinese readers used plausibility information almost exclusively when reading the sentences. Relative clause structure had no online effect and small but consistent offline effects. Taken together, the results support a slight preference in offline comprehension for Chinese subject-relative clauses, as well as a central role for semantic plausibility, which appears to be the dominant factor in online processing and a strong determinant of offline comprehension.