This study investigates the real-time processing of Chinese reflexives ziji and ta-ziji in discourse when multiple constraints are involved. Our primary goal is to examine the time course of syntactic and non-syntactic constraints in reflexive resolution. The Syntactic Filter Hypothesis argues that syntactic cues are prioritized at the early stages of processing, in contrast to the Multiple Constraints Hypothesis which posits that at this stage all streams of information can be recruited. The results of two self-paced reading experiments show that in neutral contexts where no antecedent is discourse-prominent, syntactic locality and verb semantics immediately impact real-time processing of ziji and ta-ziji. Crucially, participants’ processing patterns are also influenced at an early stage by the discourse topical status of the non-local antecedents. Overall, these findings suggest that syntax, verb semantics, and discourse prominence all play important roles at an early stage.

In the linguistics literature, it is generally accepted that the non-local use of the bare reflexive ziji in Mandarin Chinese is sensitive to perspective centers. The introduction of a local first-person pronoun encoding the comprehender’s perspective is assumed to block non-local binding (i.e. make it unavailable), a phenomenon called the blocking effect. However, it is not yet clear whether the blocking effect is absolute, nor whether the syntactic prominence of the blocking pronoun influences the strength of blocking. In this study, we report two sets of offline and online experiments to examine the blocking effect associated with ziji. By comparing the forced choice judgment results in Experiments 1 and 2, we find that syntactically prominent subject blockers lead to stronger blocking compared to object blockers, and that the strength of the blocking effect can be modulated by verb semantics. Furthermore, only subject blockers caused blocking during incremental real-time processing while object blockers did not. The results of these experiments have implications for both the linguistic formulation of the blocking effect and for sentence processing models.

There are two reflexives in Mandarin Chinese, ziji (‘self’) and ta-ziji (‘s/he-self’). It is often assumed that ziji can be bound by a non-local antecedent while ta-ziji cannot. This is because ziji can be used as an exempt anaphor licensed by discourse-pragmatic conditions. However, prior research shows that, in contexts without perspectival cues, ziji tends to be interpreted as a ‘regular’ syntactically bound reflexive, exhibiting a similar locality bias as ta-ziji. However, prior studies comparing the locality biases of ziji and ta-ziji present divergent results. In this study, we report two forced choice judgment experiments to assess which reflexive, ziji or ta-ziji, exhibits a stronger locality bias. Overall, our results fit better with claims that in local contexts, ta-ziji is preferred over ziji; we find no clear evidence of ziji being preferred over ta-ziji in local contexts. Our results are compatible with the idea that ta-ziji, rather than ziji, is more constrained by Condition A.