Subject preference in the processing of relative clauses in Chinese (original) (raw)

Processing Chinese Relative Clauses: Evidence for the Subject-Relative Advantage

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.

Relative Clause Preference in Learners of Chinese as a Second Language

It has been debated whether preference for subject-extracted relative clauses in language processing is a universal rule, with evidence from both first and second language acquisition studies. But very few studies focus on learners of Chinese as a second language. The current research studied Chinese subject/object-extracted relative clauses processing among the learners of Chinese as a second language by a self-paced reading experiment. The results demonstrate a faster and more accurate processing of subject-extracted relative clauses in both subject and object modifying conditions, adding more evidence to the universal preference for the subject-extracted relative clauses. Both Frequency-Based Accounts and Memory-Based Accounts are discussed related to the current findings.

Exploring the nature of the 'subject'-preference: Evidence from the online comprehension of simple sentences in Mandarin Chinese

Language And Cognitive Processes, 24(7-8):1180 - 1226, 2009

In two visual ERP studies, we investigated whether Mandarin Chinese shows a subject-preference in spite of the controversial status of grammatical relations in this language. We compared ERP responses at the position of the verb and the second NP in object-verb-subject (OVS) and subject-verb-object (SVO) structures. While SVO is the basic word order in Chinese and OV Correspondence should be addressed to with subject-drop is possible, OVS is strongly dispreferred. At the position of the verb, which disambiguated towards an object or a subject reading of NP1, Experiment 1 revealed an N400 for both subject-initial control conditions in comparison with the critical object-initial condition. Experiment 2 showed that this result was due to differences in lexical-semantic relatedness between NP1 and the verb. When these were controlled for, we observed an N400 for the disambiguation towards an object-initial order, i.e., evidence for a subjectpreference. At the postverbal NP, the object-initial condition showed a biphasic N400-late positivity pattern in both experiments. We interpret the N400 as reflecting the processing of an unexpected argument and the late positivity as a correlate of a well-formedness mismatch. Overall, our results suggest that Mandarin Chinese shows a subject-preference for an initial argument, thus providing further converging support for the notion that the subject-preference might constitute a universal processing strategy. We argue that the functional basis for this strategy lies in cross-linguistically applicable economy principles that serve to constrain incremental interpretation.

The subject-relative advantage in Chinese: Evidence for expectation-based processing

Journal of Memory and Language, 2015

Chinese relative clauses are an important test case for pitting the predictions of expectation-based accounts against those of memory-based theories. The memory-based accounts predict that object relatives are easier to process than subject relatives because, in object relatives, the distance between the relative clause verb and the head noun is shorter. By contrast, expectation-based accounts such as surprisal predict that the less frequent object relative should be harder to process. In previous studies on Chinese relative clause comprehension, local ambiguities may have rendered a comparison between relative clause types uninterpretable. We designed experimental materials in which no local ambiguities confound the comparison. We ran two experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) to compare reading difficulty in subject and object relatives which were placed either in subject or object modifying position. The evidence from our studies is consistent with the predictions of expectation-based accounts but not with those of memory-based theories.

Syntactic and Semantic Influences on the Time Course of Relative Clause Processing: The Role of Language Dominance

Brain Sciences, 2021

We conducted a visual world eye-tracking experiment with highly proficient Spanish-English bi-lingual adults to investigate the effects of relative language dominance, operationalized as a continuous, multidimensional variable, on the time course of relative clause processing in the first-learned language, Spanish. We found that participants exhibited two distinct processing preferences: a semantically driven preference to assign agency to referents of lexically animate noun phrases and a syntactically driven preference to interpret relative clauses as subject-extracted. Spanish dominance was found to exert a distinct influence on each of these preferences, gradiently attenuating the semantic preference while gradiently exaggerating the syntactic preference. While these results might be attributable to particular properties of Spanish and English, they also suggest a possible generalization that greater dominance in a language increases reliance on language-specific syntactic processing strategies while correspondingly decreasing reliance on more domain-general semantic processing strategies.

Early and late preferences in relative clause attachment in Portuguese and Spanish

2007

This study presents new data about the cross-language application of the Late Closure principle , whose universality was put in question by data from Spanish . Using sentences containing a restrictive relative clause unambiguously modifying the first or the second noun of a complex NP (os cúmplices do ladrão/o cúmplice dos ladrões que fugiram), this study compares the behavior of Brazilian and European Portuguese speakers participating in a self-paced reading task. The data confirm that, in early phases of processing, attachment preferences are driven by a locality principle such as Late Closure. Based on a review of studies on Portuguese, Spanish and other Romance languages, we argue that the high-versus low--attachment difference across languages emerges cleanly only in off-line tasks, such as questionnaire studies, thus limiting the types of explanations for the cross-linguistic differences. We also advance an explanation for the high attachment preferences found in unspeeded questionnaire studies based on the

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

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

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.

When relative clauses are preferred. An unexpected garden path and its consequences for sentence processing and syntax

Two eye-tracking experiments were designed to investigate a novel temporal ambiguity between object relative clauses (object RCs; 'the claim that John made is false)' and complement clauses of a noun (CCs; 'the claim that John made a mistake...') in Italian and English. This study has three main goals: the first is to assess whether a temporary ambiguity between a RC and CC structure gives rise to a garden path effect; the second, is to consider the potential implications of this effect in relation to current parsing theories and determine whether it is compatible with the predictions drawn from the family of reanalysis-based two-stages models (a.o. Frazier 1987; Traxler, Pickering & Clifton 1998; Van Gompel, Pickering & Traxler 1999); the third is to evaluate competing syntactic analysis for CC structures. A more traditional analysis of CCs will be compared with a recent proposal presented in Cecchetto & Donati (2011) and Donati & Cecchetto (2015). We will show that only this latter account is consistent with our experimental findings.

Processing Preference Toward Object-Extracted Relative Clauses in Mandarin Chinese by L1 and L2 Speakers: An Eye-Tracking Study

Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

The current study employed an eye-movement technique with an attempt to explore the reading patterns for the two types of Chinese relative clauses, subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs), by native speakers (L1), and Japanese learners (L2) of Chinese. The data were analyzed in terms of gaze duration, regression path duration, and regression rate on the two critical regions, head noun, and embedded verb. The results indicated that both the L1 and L2 participants spent less time on the head nouns in ORCs than in SRCs. Also, the L2 participants spent less time on the embedded verbs in ORCs than in SRCs and their regression rate for embedded verbs was generally lower in ORCs than in SRC. The findings showed that the participants experienced less processing difficulty in ORCs than SRCs. These results suggest an ORC preference in L1 and L2 speakers of Chinese, which provides evidence in support of linear distance hypothesis and implies that the syntactic nature of Chinese is at play in the RC processing.