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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jul 6, 2026

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

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

Published on: September 5, 2019

Discourse structure and relative clause processing.

Willem M Mak¹, Wietski Vonk, Herbert Schriefers

¹University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. pim.mak@let.uu.nl

Memory & Cognition

|March 8, 2008

Summary

Discourse factors influence sentence processing. When noun phrases in relative clauses are topicworthy, object-relative clauses become easier to process, challenging previous assumptions.

Area of Science:

Psycholinguistics
Cognitive Science
Linguistics

Background:

Subject-relative clauses are generally easier to process than object-relative clauses.
The topichood hypothesis suggests topicworthiness drives this preference.
Topicworthy entities are preferentially assigned the subject role in relative clauses.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the role of discourse factors in processing relative clauses.
To test whether topicworthiness of noun phrases (NPs) within relative clauses affects processing difficulty.
To examine if discourse prominence overrides the default preference for subject-relative clauses.

Main Methods:

Experiment 1: Tested relative clauses containing personal pronouns, assumed to be topicworthy.

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Experiment 2: Manipulated the discourse status of NPs in relative clauses (discourse topic vs. new).

Comparative analysis of processing preferences for subject- vs. object-relative clauses under varying discourse conditions.

Main Results:

Experiment 1 showed a preference for object-relative clauses when personal pronouns (discourse topics) were present.
Experiment 2 demonstrated reduced processing difficulty for object-relative clauses when the NP was the discourse topic.
Processing difficulty of object-relative clauses decreased when the NP was discourse-prominent, irrespective of explicit cues.

Conclusions:

Discourse factors, specifically the topicworthiness of noun phrases, significantly impact sentence-level processing.
The topichood hypothesis is supported, showing that discourse prominence can alter relative clause processing preferences.
Sentence processing is not solely determined by syntactic structure but is dynamically influenced by discourse context.