Frequency issues of classifier configurations for processing Mandarin object-extracted relative clauses: A corpus study

Abstract

Psycholinguistic studies on whether classifiers facilitate processing objectextracted relative clauses (RC) in Mandarin have often made use of a classifier mismatch-match configuration, wherein a preceding classifier mismatches the following RC-subject but matches the modified head noun. However, an examination of the Chinese Treebank corpus 5.0 shows this configuration rarely occurs. None of the 10 tokens of pre-RC classifiers conforms to the mismatchmatch configuration in a real sense. Instead, either a dropped RC-subject or some intervening item successfully avoids anticipated lexical disruption effects induced by a mismatching classifier. The results of analysis suggest that the constructed examples used in previous psycholinguistic studies may not realistically test natural language processing procedures.

Effects of Early Cues on the Processing of Chinese Relative Clauses: Evidence for Experience‐Based Theories

“…Although the facilitative effects of BEI were consistently found early —either within the RC (in Experiment 2) or modulated by an interaction (at DE in Experiment 1 and in the combined region of DE+head noun in Experiments 1 and 2)—the facilitative effects of classifiers were delayed , reaching significance only in the main clause regions. As predicted by experience‐based accounts, this is presumably due to the lexical disruptions associated with the classifier cue that mismatches with the subsequent noun and the structural rarity of classifier‐noun incongruity (Wu, ). The presence of BEI, however, removes the lexical disruption of the CL, no‐BEI condition, allowing the main effect of BEI to emerge early.…”

“…Interestingly, among the five tokens of ORCs identified in Wu () that correspond to our example (5b), the local nouns are either dropped or have an additional word intervening between the mismatching classifier and the local noun, most probably to avoid possible incidence of grammatical disharmony triggered by a mismatch between a classifier and a local noun appearing next to each other. This suggests that the local classifier‐noun mismatch present in the CL, no‐BEI condition (5b) might be rare in Chinese comprehenders’ experience.…”

“…We found only five tokens of ORCs preceded by classifiers, none having the mismatch‐match configuration (as in our CL, no‐BEI condition, ex. (5b)) where a classifier is adjacent to an incongruent RC‐subject and distant from a congruent RC‐head (Wu, ). We found 51 tokens of passivized SRCs, accounting for 15% of the total transitive RCs, and 9 tokens of SRCs with both a classifier and a passive marker.…”

“…(5b)). Given that a semantically congruent classifier‐noun sequence forming a determiner phrase (DP) is very common in both written and spoken Chinese, and that our corpus data show the local classifier‐noun mismatch configuration in ORCs is virtually non‐existent (Wu, ), we suggest that Chinese comprehenders might experience rather high surprisal upon encountering the RC‐internal noun in (5b), and this effect might spill over to the following regions given the nature of self‐paced reading paradigm. This prediction is further supported by existing processing work showing that a mismatching classifier in a canonical ORC could induce rather severe lexical disruption, particularly when the RC modifies the sentential subject (Hsu, ).…”

The subject-relative advantage in Chinese: Evidence for expectation-based processing

“…In other words, memory-based accounts predict an object relative advantage. 1 By contrast, the expectation account outlined above, which assumes that rare structures are harder to process, predicts that in ORs, longer reading times should be seen compared to SRs (i.e., a subject relative advantage); this is because, similar to English, SRs are more frequent than object relatives in Chinese (Chen, Grove, & Hale, 2012;Hsiao & Gibson, 2003;Vasishth, Chen, Li, & Guo, 2013;Wu, 2009;Wu, 2011;Wu, Kaiser, & Andersen, 2010). The expectation-based account would predict an SR advantage as soon as the relative clause is built; and this SR advantage could plausibly spill over to the head noun and beyond as well.…”