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

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Psycholinguistics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Working memory (WM) is crucial for processing complex sentences, particularly spoken ones due to their memory demands.
• The dual-modal interference paradigm helps examine WM's role in syntactic processing.
• Chinese relative clauses (RCs) present a unique case for studying processing asymmetry.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the role of working memory in processing Chinese relative clauses (RCs).
• To examine potential processing asymmetries between subject-gapped (SRC) and object-gapped (ORC) RCs.
• To explore the impact of dual-modal interference on RC comprehension.

Main Methods:

• Two experiments used auditory stimuli of Chinese SRC and ORC sentences.
• Experiment 1 involved intra-sentential visual lexical decision tasks at different timepoints.
• Experiment 2 used extra-sentential visual digital recall tasks with varying memory loads.

Main Results:

• Experiment 1 showed no overall SRC or ORC advantage, but context-dependent preferences (ORC at sentence ends, SRC at main verbs).
• Experiment 2 revealed dynamic patterns: SRC advantage in the RC marker region without load, shifting to ORC advantage under higher load.
• These findings challenge previous notions of inherent processing asymmetry in Chinese RCs.

Conclusions:

• No obvious or intrinsic processing asymmetry was found in Chinese RC processing.
• Working memory's dynamic engagement influences RC processing patterns.
• The dual-modal interference paradigm is a valuable tool for studying spoken sentence processing and working memory.