Thematic orders and the comprehension of subject-extracted relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese.

ABSTRACT: This study investigates the comprehension of three kinds of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRs) in Mandarin Chinese: standard SRs, relative clauses involving the disposal ba construction ("disposal SRs"), and relative clauses involving the long passive bei constructions ("passive SRs"). In a self-paced reading experiment, the regions before the relativizer (where the sentential fragments are temporarily ambiguous) showed reading patterns consistent with expectation-based incremental processing: standard SRs, with the highest constructional frequency and the least complex syntactic structure, were processed faster than the other two variants. However, in the regions after the relativizer and the head noun where the existence of a relative clause is unambiguously indicated, a top-down g

SUBMITTER: Lin CJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4566039 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature