The Distribution of Relative Clauses in Chinese Discourse

Pu, Ming‐Ming

doi:10.1207/s15326950dp4301_2

Cited by 11 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…First, the configuration of animacy in the corpus, in both main clauses and relative clauses, is strikingly similar to findings in other languages and also replicates and extends previous Mandarin corpus studies (Pu, 2007; Wu et al, 2012). Key results here include the tendency for main clause subjects to be animate and objects to be inanimate, the tendency of SRC heads to be animate and ORC heads to be inanimate, and the rarity of RCs with two nouns of the same animacy (both animate or both inanimate, Wu et al, 2012).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

“…Although other corpus analyses exist for Mandarin RCs (Hsiao and Gibson, 2003; Pu, 2007; Wu, 2009; Vasishth et al, 2013), our study was unique in its large scale (incorporating many non-RC structures), its hand-coding of animacy across both RC and non-RC sentences, and its use in training the SRN. The combination with the SRN is crucial here because RC processing difficulty in both human and model is not simply a function of the frequency of RCs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, most studies have examined only relative clauses that modified main clause subjects, and containing only animate head nouns and relative clause nouns. Such relative clauses are in reality rare in the linguistic environment (Pu, 2007; Wu et al, 2012; Vasishth et al, 2013). As a result, the Mandarin relative clause research, which could in principle be extremely informative about cross-linguistic regularities and differences in complex sentence interpretation, is instead marginalized by a lack of consensus and by overly-broad claims based on a narrow range of stimulus materials.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Experience and generalization in a connectionist model of Mandarin Chinese relative clause processing

Hsiao

MacDonald

2013

Front. Psychol.

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Sentences containing relative clauses are well known to be difficult to comprehend, and they have long been an arena in which to investigate the role of working memory in language comprehension. However, recent work has suggested that relative clause processing is better described by ambiguity resolution processes than by limits on extrinsic working memory. We investigated these alternative views with a Simple Recurrent Network (SRN) model of relative clause processing in Mandarin Chinese, which has a unique pattern of word order across main and relative clauses and which has yielded mixed results in human comprehension studies. To assess the model's ability to generalize from similar sentence structures, and to observe effects of ambiguity through the sentence, we trained the model on several different sentence types, based on a detailed corpus analysis of Mandarin relative clauses and simple sentences, coded to include patterns of noun animacy in the various structures. The model was evaluated on 16 different relative clause subtypes. Its performance corresponded well to human reading times, including effects previously attributed to working memory overflow. The model's performance across a wide variety of sentence types suggested that the seemingly inconsistent results in some prior empirical studies stemmed from failures to consider the full range of sentence types in empirical studies. Crucially, sentence difficulty for the model was not simply a reflection of sentence frequency in the training set; the model generalized from similar sentences and showed high error rates at points of ambiguity. The results suggest that SRNs are a powerful tool to examine the complicated constraint-satisfaction process of sentence comprehension, and that understanding comprehension of specific structures must include consideration of experiences with other similar structures in the language.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 87%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Experience and generalization in a connectionist model of Mandarin Chinese relative clause processing

Hsiao

MacDonald

2013

Front. Psychol.

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“…While there are other previous corpus analyses of Mandarin relative clauses (Hsiao & Gibson, 2003;Hsiao & MacDonald, 2013;Jäger et al, 2015;Lin, 2011;Pu, 2007;Wu, 2009), those analyses did not fully considered these lexico-syntactic pairings. Wu (2009), Lin (2011 and Hsiao and MacDonald (2013) all conducted corpus analyses on Mandarin relative clauses that included noun animacy as a factor, but none fully investigated the conditions relevant to the production data in Experiment 1 (Lin, 2011, investigated animacy in passive relative clauses in general, without distinguishing full and bare passives).…”

Section: Corpus Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Production predicts comprehension: Animacy effects in Mandarin relative clause processing

Hsiao

MacDonald

2016

Journal of Memory and Language

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a b s t r a c tThis article investigates the relationship between production and comprehension of relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese. In a picture description task, we find strong head noun animacy effects on relative clause production despite the fact that Mandarin has headfinal relative clauses ([[relative clause] head noun]), so that the animate/inanimate head noun is uttered late. These and other production results have implications for theories of incremental language planning. We then used corpus analyses to investigate the distribution of structure-message pairings in the language that result from these animacy-based production biases. Mandarin is particularly interesting from the language comprehension side, as there is an extensive literature on relative clause comprehension, with conflicting results. A gated sentence completion task reveals comprehenders' animacy-linked expectations in relative clause interpretation and also shows the substantial amount of syntactic ambiguity in Mandarin relative clauses, owing to their head-final structure. The completion data were reliable predictors of comprehenders' self-paced reading times, but the distance between syntactically-dependent elements in the sentences was not. We argue that these results argue against accounts of sentence comprehension that posit that some sentence types are inherently more difficult than others. Instead we suggest that sentence types with which comprehenders have little experience are difficult, and we link the results ultimately to producers' different production choices in different animacy configurations and consequent variation in language patterns that comprehenders experience.Ó 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. IntroductionIn order to test theories of how people comprehend language, researchers often measure comprehension difficulty of certain sentence types via some combination of reading times and accuracy, typically via responses to comprehension questions. Because differences in time/accuracy across sentence conditions cannot by themselves indicate why one sentence type is harder than another, data patterns are given different interpretations in various theoretical accounts of comprehension processes. Recent sentence processing research has been divided between experience-based approaches, including both constraintbased accounts . Briefly, experience-based approaches suggest that comprehenders gain skill at some or all levels of language interpretation from past sentence comprehension experience, so that comprehension difficulty is predicted to vary with past experience with similar language http://dx.

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“…Depending on the grammatical role in the main clause assumed by the relativized head noun, the 1,209 RCs were further coded into 6 types as defined in Fox and Thompson (1990) and Pu (2007): subject-modifying (see examples 1-2 in Section 1), object-modifying (see examples 3-4), object of preposition, predicate nominal, existential, and possessive. See Appendix A for examples of the latter four types.…”

Section: Coding Proceduresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

Wu¹

2011

Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory

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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.

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The Distribution of Relative Clauses in Chinese Discourse

Cited by 11 publications

References 7 publications

Experience and generalization in a connectionist model of Mandarin Chinese relative clause processing

Experience and generalization in a connectionist model of Mandarin Chinese relative clause processing

Production predicts comprehension: Animacy effects in Mandarin relative clause processing

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

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