Processing coordinate structures in Chinese: evidence from eye movements

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Computational Linguistics
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Understanding sentence comprehension is crucial for psycholinguistics.
• Chinese coordinate structures present unique parsing challenges.
• Eye-tracking offers insights into real-time language processing.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the processing of coordinate structures in Chinese sentence comprehension using eye-tracking.
• To determine the effect of the conjunction 'huo zhe' on syntactic parsing preferences.
• To explore the role of predictive processing in sentence comprehension.

Main Methods:

• An eye-tracking experiment was conducted with native Chinese readers.
• Participants read sentences with coordinate structures, varying the position of 'huo zhe'.
• Reading times and regressions were analyzed to infer processing costs and parsing strategies.

Main Results:

• Readers showed a strong preference for initial noun phrase (NP)-coordination parsing.
• Processing costs were observed when abandoning NP-coordination, depending on ambiguity.
• A sentence-initial 'huo zhe' significantly reduced reading times and regressions, mitigating parsing preferences.

Conclusions:

• The conjunction 'huo zhe' at the sentence's start facilitates predictive syntactic structuring.
• Predictive processing enabled by 'huo zhe' can override initial parsing preferences.
• Findings have implications for top-down parsing theories and models of syntactic analysis.