Semantic support and parallel parsing in Chinese

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted using written Chinese sentences that contained a multi-word ambiguous region. The goal was to determine whether readers maintained multiple interpretations throughout the ambiguous region or selected a single interpretation at the point of ambiguity. Within the ambiguous region, we manipulated the strength of support for the complement clause (CC) analysis and the relative clause (RC) analysis of the ambiguous construction Verb NP1 de NP2. In Experiment 1, the critical sentences were disambiguated to the dispreferred CC interpretation; in Experiment 2, the sentences were disambiguated as the preferred RC interpretation. Unsurprisingly, processing difficulty at the point of disambiguation was observed only in Experiment 1. As predicted by a parallel mechanism, greater processing difficulty arose at disambiguation when the RC interpretation was much more strongly supported by semantic cues relative to the CC alternative, than when the two analyses were semantically supported to a similar degree. Regression analyses confirmed that the degree of semantic support predicted processing difficulty at disambiguation. The findings provide evidence for a parallel constraint-based parsing mechanism.