Effect of thematic order on the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses

Lin, Chien-Jer Charles

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2013.12.003

Cited by 24 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 53 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Further analysis indicates that this outcome may have been due to uncontrolled factors, such as local ambiguities (C. Lin and Bever 2011;Qiao et al 2012;Vasishth et al 2013;Y. Hsiao et al 2014) 2 and syntactic priming from the context with different thematic orders (Lin 2014). With stimuli that control local ambiguities such as the availability of argument omission, Jäger et al (in press) observe a robust Subject Advantage in Chinese RCs.…”

Section: The Subject Advantage In Cjkmentioning

confidence: 98%

Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages

Yun

Chen

Hunter

et al. 2014

J East Asian Linguist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The processing difficulty profile for relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean represents a challenge for theories of human parsing. We address this challenge using a grammar-based complexity metric, one that reflects a minimalist analysis of relative clauses for all three languages as well as structure-dependent corpus distributions. Together, these define a comprehender's degree of uncertainty at each point in a sentence. We use this idea to quantify the intuition that people do comprehension work as they incrementally resolve ambiguity, word by word. We find that downward changes to this quantitative measure of uncertainty derive observed processing contrasts between Subject-and Object-extracted relative clauses. This demonstrates that the complexity metric, in conjunction with a minimalist grammar and corpus-based weights, accounts for the widely-observed Subject Advantage. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article

show abstract

Section: The Subject Advantage In Cjkmentioning

confidence: 98%

Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages

Yun

Chen

Hunter

et al. 2014

J East Asian Linguist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In our design, the basic word order is the same across conditions, but sentences without BEI contain ORCs, whereas sentences with BEI contain (passivized) SRCs. 6 Thus, comparing them can allow us to gain insights into the debate between the processing ease of SRCs and ORCs (e.g., Gibson & Wu, 2013;Hsiao & Gibson, 2003;J€ ager et al, 2015;Kuo & Vasishth, 2006;Lin, 2014;Lin & Bever, 2006, 2011Vasishth et al, 2013).…”

Section: Goals and Predictionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Early Cues on the Processing of Chinese Relative Clauses: Evidence for Experience‐Based Theories

Kaiser

Vasishth

2017

Cognitive Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We used Chinese prenominal relative clauses (RCs) to test the predictions of two competing accounts of sentence comprehension difficulty: the experience-based account of Levy () and the Dependency Locality Theory (DLT; Gibson, ). Given that in Chinese RCs, a classifier and/or a passive marker BEI can be added to the sentence-initial position, we manipulated the presence/absence of classifiers and the presence/absence of BEI, such that BEI sentences were passivized subject-extracted RCs, and no-BEI sentences were standard object-extracted RCs. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments, using the same critical stimuli but somewhat different filler items. Reading time patterns from both experiments showed facilitative effects of BEI within and beyond RC regions, and delayed facilitative effects of classifiers, suggesting that cues that occur before a clear signal of an upcoming RC can help Chinese comprehenders to anticipate RC structures. The data patterns are not predicted by the DLT, but they are consistent with the predictions of experience-based theories.

show abstract

“…However, the effect was already significant at the relativizer preceding the head noun, which is not predicted by either DLT integration or storage cost metrics. In recent work, Lin (2014) has argued that the OR advantage observed in Gibson and Wu (2013)'s materials might reflect a syntactic priming from the context rather than a lower DLT integration cost in ORs. Using materials similar to Wu (2013)'s, Lin (2014) additionally manipulated the different thematic orders in the context and found a stronger OR advantage when the thematic order in the preceding context was similar to the one of an OR.…”

Section: Previous Work On Chinese Relative Clausesmentioning

confidence: 99%