TY - JOUR
T1 - Processing Chinese relative clauses in context
AU - Gibson, Edward
AU - Wu, H. H.Iris
N1 - Funding Information:
Correspondence should be addressed to Edward Gibson, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 46-3035, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. E-mail: [email protected] We would like to thank the following people for helpful discussions of and comments on this work: Ev Fedorenko, Tomoko Ishizuka, Arthur Wang, the audience at the CUNY conference on sentence processing at Chapel Hill, NC, 2008, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The research conducted here was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0844472, ‘‘Bayesian Cue Integration in Probability-Sensitive Language Processing’’. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
PY - 2013/1
Y1 - 2013/1
N2 - This paper presents a self-paced reading experiment comparing the processing of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) in supportive contexts in Chinese. It is argued that lack of a consistent pattern in the literature for the comparison between Chinese SRCs and ORCs is due to potential temporary ambiguity in these constructions in null contexts. By placing the materials in contexts biased towards a relative clause (RC) interpretation, we limit the effects of temporary ambiguity. The results of the experiment demonstrate that SRCs are read more slowly than ORCs in supportive contexts. These results provide evidence for working memory-based sentence processing theories whereby processing difficulty increases for connecting sentence elements that are further apart. Some convergent evidence that strengthens these conclusions comes from recent research on aphasic populations where a dissociation between English and Chinese RC processing has been revealed: whereas English aphasic patients have more difficulty with ORCs and Chinese aphasic patients have more difficulty with SRCs (Su, Lee, & Chung, 2007). Taken together, these results support the idea that sentence processing is constrained by working memory limitations.
AB - This paper presents a self-paced reading experiment comparing the processing of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) and object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) in supportive contexts in Chinese. It is argued that lack of a consistent pattern in the literature for the comparison between Chinese SRCs and ORCs is due to potential temporary ambiguity in these constructions in null contexts. By placing the materials in contexts biased towards a relative clause (RC) interpretation, we limit the effects of temporary ambiguity. The results of the experiment demonstrate that SRCs are read more slowly than ORCs in supportive contexts. These results provide evidence for working memory-based sentence processing theories whereby processing difficulty increases for connecting sentence elements that are further apart. Some convergent evidence that strengthens these conclusions comes from recent research on aphasic populations where a dissociation between English and Chinese RC processing has been revealed: whereas English aphasic patients have more difficulty with ORCs and Chinese aphasic patients have more difficulty with SRCs (Su, Lee, & Chung, 2007). Taken together, these results support the idea that sentence processing is constrained by working memory limitations.
KW - Relative clause
KW - Sentence processing
KW - Syntactic complexity
KW - Working memory
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U2 - 10.1080/01690965.2010.536656
DO - 10.1080/01690965.2010.536656
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84873106996
SN - 0169-0965
VL - 28
SP - 125
EP - 155
JO - Language and Cognitive Processes
JF - Language and Cognitive Processes
IS - 1-2
ER -