When Structure Competes with Semantics: Reading Chinese Relative Clauses

Abstract

An ongoing debate in Chinese psycholinguistics is whether subject-relative clauses or object-relative clauses are more difficult to process. The current study asks what happens when structure and plausibility are pitted against each other in Chinese relative clause processing. Chinese relative clause structures and semantic plausibility were manipulated to create both plausible and implausible versions of subject-and object-relative clauses. This method has been used in other languages (e.g., English) to elicit thematic role reversal comprehension errors. Importantly, these errors-as well as online processing difficulties-are especially frequent in implausible versions of dispreferred (noncanoncial) structures. If one relative clause structure in Chinese is highly dispreferred, the structural factor and plausibility factor should interact additively. If, however, the structures are relatively equally difficult to process, then there should be only a main effect of plausibility. Sentence reading times as well as analyses on lexical interest areas revealed that Chinese readers used plausibility information almost exclusively when reading the sentences. Relative clause structure had no online effect and small but consistent offline effects. Taken together, the results support a slight preference in offline comprehension for Chinese subject-relative clauses, as well as a central role for semantic plausibility, which appears to be the dominant factor in online processing and a strong determinant of offline comprehension. Keywords:Chinese relative clauses; semantic plausibility; syntactic parsing; eye movements; Good Enough Theory Introduction Chinese relative clauses processingChinese has a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure, but the word order in Chinese relative clauses is different from most other languages with SVO structure. Unlike English or French, whose relative clause structure is head-initial, Chinese has head-final relative clauses, with the relative clause preceding the head noun (see (1)). Thus, in the Chinese subject-relative clause (SRC), the word order is "V-N(patient)-de-N(agent)" while in object-relative clause (ORC), the word order is "N(agent)-V-de-N(patient)." On one hand, the distance between the relative clause verb and the head noun is longer in SRCs, which may cause longer integration and processing time for SRCs. In addition, the canonical agent-first word order is reversed in SRCs, potentially also increasing processing difficulty. On the other hand, the de in the ORC is temporarily ambiguous. The relativizer de also appears as a postnominal genitive (possessive) marker. This ambiguity in ORCs is not resolved until the main clause verb. Thus, it may take longer for readers to process and reanalyze the de in ORCs to reach the correct interpretation. In both cases, the main clause verb is a critical point of integration and/or disambiguation (cf. Staub, Dillon, & Clifton, 2017).(1) a. 传唤(summon)证人(witness)的(that)法官(judge)喜欢 ( The witness/judge liked Beijing opera (True/False) Zhou, P., et al...

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