What Memory-Load Interference Tasks Tell Us about Spoken Relative Clause Processing

The relationship between working memory (WM) and language processing has been extensively investigated in cognitive research. Previous studies mostly obtain evidence from measuring the involvement of WM in complex syntactic structures reported with well-established processing asymmetry, e.g., relative clauses (RCs) in English. Rarely considered is the role of WM in language whose RC processing asymmetry presents conflicting results, e.g., Chinese. This study addresses the research gap. Three experiments with a self-paced listening paradigm interfered with concurrent digit-load and lexical-decision interference were conducted on subject-extracted RCs (SRC) and object-extracted RCs (ORC). Listening times show no disparity between SRCs and ORCs, nor is either SRC or ORC processing more affected by syntactic complexity at comparable positions under each condition. Nevertheless, the post-sentence comprehension shows greater impairment in SRCs than ORCs. The results that memory load interfering does not differentially impair the availability of WM resources used for Chinese RC processing provide evidence for the specialization role of working memory. The findings demonstrate a dynamic, fluctuating wave pattern for Chinese RC processing. We argue that there is no RC processing asymmetry in Chinese.