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Processing relative clauses in Chinese.

Franny Hsiao1, Edward Gibson

  • 1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. fhsiao@mit.edu

Cognition
|November 5, 2003
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Object-extracted relative clauses in Chinese are less complex than subject-extracted ones, unlike in English. This finding in Chinese sentence complexity challenges universal assumptions and highlights word order

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Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Syntactic Theory

Background:

  • Processing of relative clauses varies across languages, particularly in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) languages.
  • Previous research on languages like English suggests object-extracted relative clauses are more complex than subject-extracted ones.
  • Chinese, an SVO language, exhibits a unique word order where relative clauses precede head nouns.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the processing complexity of object-extracted versus subject-extracted relative clauses in Chinese.
  • To test predictions derived from resource-based theories of sentence complexity.
  • To examine the role of word order and head-noun prediction in syntactic processing.

Main Methods:

  • A self-paced reading study was conducted with Chinese speakers.
  • Participants read sentences containing object-extracted and subject-extracted relative clauses.
  • Corpus analyses of Chinese texts were performed to support frequency-based theoretical constraints.

Main Results:

  • Object-extracted relative clause structures in Chinese were found to be less complex than subject-extracted structures.
  • This finding contrasts with processing patterns observed in other SVO languages like English.
  • Results are consistent with theories emphasizing storage costs for predicting syntactic heads and matching word orders.

Conclusions:

  • The word order of relative clauses significantly impacts sentence processing complexity.
  • Extraction complexity is not intrinsically tied to grammatical position (subject vs. object) but depends on language-specific word order.
  • Findings support a resource-based view of sentence complexity and highlight the importance of cross-linguistic variation in syntactic processing.