The Impact of World Knowledge on the Processing of Mandarin Possessive Reflexive zijide

It has long been considered that the Mandarin possessive reflexive zijide can be either locally bound or long distance bound, leading to ambiguity where it fails to exclusively refer back to either long distance binding NP or the local NP. In addition to syntactic factors such as the local versus long distance division, the present study examined the potential influence of general world knowledge on the interpretation of zijide. Three experiments, two offline sentence evaluation tasks and one online sentence reading task, found that zijide could be either facilitated or impeded by world knowledge carried in the NPs of the sentence. The results showed that in some cases, zijide was considered exclusively referring back to the long distance NP. These findings seemed to support the notion of subject orientation effect and demonstrated the influence of world knowledge on the processing of Mandarin possessive reflexive zijide.