Processing Chinese Relative Clauses: Evidence for the Subject-Relative Advantage

A general fact about language is that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Recently, several self-paced reading studies have presented surprising evidence that object relatives in Chinese are easier to process than subject relatives. We carried out three self-...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPloS one Vol. 8; no. 10; p. e77006
Main Authors Vasishth, Shravan, Chen, Zhong, Li, Qiang, Guo, Gueilan
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Public Library of Science 02.10.2013
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects
Bayes Theorem
Bayesian analysis
China
Clauses (Grammar)
Cognition & reasoning
Comprehension - physiology
Conditional probability
Female
Humans
Hypotheses
Integration
Language
Linguistics
Male
Memory
Meta-analysis
Natural language processing
Pattern Recognition, Visual - physiology
Psycholinguistics
Reading
Retrieval
Science
Semantics
Young Adult
China
United Kingdom
New York
France
United States > US
Germany
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Summary:A general fact about language is that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Recently, several self-paced reading studies have presented surprising evidence that object relatives in Chinese are easier to process than subject relatives. We carried out three self-paced reading experiments that attempted to replicate these results. Two of our three studies found a subject-relative preference, and the third study found an object-relative advantage. Using a random effects bayesian meta-analysis of fifteen studies (including our own), we show that the overall current evidence for the subject-relative advantage is quite strong (approximate posterior probability of a subject-relative advantage given the data: 78-80%). We argue that retrieval/integration based accounts would have difficulty explaining all three experimental results. These findings are important because they narrow the theoretical space by limiting the role of an important class of explanation-retrieval/integration cost-at least for relative clause processing in Chinese.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
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Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Conceived and designed the experiments: SV ZC QL GG. Performed the experiments: ZC QL GG. Analyzed the data: SV. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: SV. Wrote the paper: SV ZC QL GG.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0077006