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Updated: Jul 4, 2026

Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks
Published on: September 5, 2019
Chinese subject-relative clauses are more difficult to process than the object-relative clauses
Baoguo Chen1, Aihua Ning, Hongyan Bi
1Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China. Chenbg@bnu.edu.cn
Abstract:
This paper presents an experiment that compared high and low working memory span readers' abilities to process Chinese subject-relative and object-relative clause structures in a self-paced reading paradigm. Comprehension performance results indicated that the object-relative structure was easier to understand than the subject-relative structure. Reading time results showed that participants with low working memory span read the subject-relative structures more slowly than the object-relative structures, but there was no reading time difference for the high working memory span participants. The experiment provides further evidence that the Chinese subject-relative clause structure is more difficult to process than the Chinese object-relative clause structure, especially for low working memory span individuals. Furthermore, these results support a syntactic storage account of the observed complexity difference.
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