The processing difficulty profile for relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean represents a challenge for theories of human parsing. We address this challenge using a grammar-based complexity metric, one that reflects a minimalist analysis of relative clauses for all three languages as well as structure-dependent corpus distributions. Together, these define a comprehender's degree of uncertainty at each point in a sentence. We use this idea to quantify the intuition that people do comprehension work as they incrementally resolve ambiguity, word by word. We find that downward changes to this quantitative measure of uncertainty derive observed processing contrasts between Subject-and Object-extracted relative clauses. This demonstrates that the complexity metric, in conjunction with a minimalist grammar and corpus-based weights, accounts for the widely-observed Subject Advantage. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article

No abstract

This article presents an experiment investigating the relative contribution of two different prosodic properties to the interpretation and scope configuration of wh-indeterminates in Korean. The experiment shows that it is prosodic phrasing after the wh-indeterminate that determines whether it is interpreted as interrogative or indefinite. Prosodic prominence on the wh-indeterminate does not contribute to such a distinction; rather, it increases the possibility of a wide scope reading. The results support the theory that prosodic phrasing is crucial in forming wh-questions, and call for consideration of the influence of prosody on scope-taking properties of wh-indefinites.

No abstract

No abstract