Edited by: Matthew Wagers, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
Reviewed by: Ming Xiang, University of Chicago, USA; Lauren Clemens, McGIll University, Canada
*Correspondence: Chien-Jer Charles Lin, Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, Indiana University, 355 North Jordan Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405-1105, USA
This article was submitted to Language Sciences, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
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This study investigates the comprehension of three kinds of subject-extracted relative clauses (SRs) in Mandarin Chinese: standard SRs, relative clauses involving the disposal
Relative clauses have been of great theoretical interest to sentence processing researchers, with decades of research comparing the processing of subject-extracted relative clauses (henceforth “SRs”) to that of object-extracted relative clauses (henceforth “ORs”). A robust asymmetry has been repeatedly reported in languages where the relative clauses follow the nouns they modify (i.e., languages with head-initial relative clauses). In English, for example, relative clauses involving subject extractions like (1) have been found to be easier to comprehend than those involving object extractions like (2) (Ford,
(1) Subject-extracted relative clause:
{
(2) Object-extracted relative clause:
{
Two main groups of theories have been adopted to account for this processing asymmetry, here referred to as “integration-based theories” and “experience-based theories.” The first group of theories focuses on the consumption of working memory in constructing filler-gap dependencies, suggesting that SRs in English are easier to comprehend (with shorter reading times and greater comprehension accuracies) because, relative to ORs, less working memory is required to process them. Within these integration-based theories, a number of proposals have been made as to precisely how the relevant processing costs are computed. A linearity account (e.g., Gibson,
Within the integration-based theories, a structural account (e.g., O'Grady,
The second group of theories is experience-based, formalized either as constraints (e.g., MacDonald and Christiansen,
A related experience-based theory posits that the dominant (i.e., most frequent) thematic order in a language can be used as a perceptual strategy to facilitate sentence comprehension (Bever,
This brief summary highlights the fact that the overall advantageous reading of SRs in English is consistent with multiple theories of sentence comprehension though specific predictions about where the processing differences should be observed may differ. Gibson and Wu (
An accumulating body of research over the past decade has painted a somewhat different picture of the processing of head-final relative clauses (Basque: Carreiras et al.,
To illustrate the theoretical relevance of head-final relative clause processing, consider the Mandarin Chinese (henceforth “Chinese”) sentences with relative clauses in (3) and (4)
(3) Sentence with subject-extracted relative clause in Chinese:
_i aimu yinyuejia de zuoqujiai he-le yi bei jiu
_i adore musician
“The composer who adored the musician drank a glass of wine.”
(4) Sentence with object-extracted relative clause in Chinese:
zuoqujia aimu _i de yinyuejiai he-le yi bei jiu
composer adore _i
“The musician whom the composer adored drank a glass of wine.”
Chinese displays a head-initial structure in verb phrases: like English, Chinese is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language, with verbs preceding their NP object complements. At the same time, however, Chinese displays a head-final structure in NP: modifiers of nouns exclusively appear before the head noun. Because of this combination, while subject gaps in Chinese are higher and structurally closer to the complementizer/relativizer than object gaps (as in English), subject gaps are linearly
Regarding gap-filler integration, therefore, the linearity account predicts that the gap-filler relation in a Chinese OR should be less taxing to construct than that in an SR. The structure-based account predicts the opposite: since fewer structural nodes intervene between the head noun and a subject gap, the dependency between these two should be easier to construct compared to one involving an object gap. Both accounts would predict the locus of processing differences on the head noun where gap-filler integrations take place.
Regarding the effect of structural probabilities, given that SRs have higher frequencies than ORs in Chinese (Wu et al.,
Chinese has thus been taken as a valuable test case for validating the integration-based accounts and experience-based accounts depicted above (see also Jäger et al.,
On the other hand, when relative clauses are pragmatically motivated or structurally disambiguated, one needs to consider the potential effects of the different contextual cues. Chinese relative clauses have previously been pragmatically motivated by using discourse contexts (Gibson and Wu,
Methodologically, processing studies comparing Chinese SRs and ORs have reached a bottleneck. In most previous studies, SRs have been directly compared to ORs, meaning that SRs and ORs serve as each other's baseline conditions. Accordingly, any processing difference between the two has typically been associated with one single factor of theoretical interest. For instance, Gibson (
The present study addresses this methodological issue by holding the extraction site constant (only SRs) and investigating the processing of three different
(5) Standard SR:
__i jiaoxing furen de zuoqujiai he yi bei jiu
__i wake.up lady
“The composer that woke up the lady drank a glass of wine.”
(6) Long passive (
__i bei furen jiaoxing de zuoqujiai he yi bei jiu
__i BEI lady wake.up
“The composer that was woken up by the lady drank a glass of wine.”
(7) Disposal (
__i ba furen jiaoxing de zuoqujiai he yi bei
__i BA lady wake.up
jiu
wine
“The composer that woke up the lady drank a glass of wine.”
Being SRs, all three structures involve the extraction and relativization of the subject NP, which, in Chinese, involves a movement type of dependency between the subject gap and the head NP (Aoun and Li,
The syntactic structure of a standard SR is illustrated in Figure
The syntactic structure of a passive SR is illustrated in Figure
The structure of a disposal SR is illustrated in Figure
The processing factors discussed above cast different effects on these three types of Chinese SRs. Let's first focus on the integration effects regarding the dependency between the subject gap and the head noun in each of the three structures, which are usually taken to be observable around the head noun region, where filler-gap integrations take place. In terms of linear locality (Gibson,
In addition to the gap-filler dependencies, the passive SRs and the disposal SRs involve additional displacement dependencies as depicted in Figures
Next, we consider the overall structural complexity and structural frequencies involved in the three types of SRs. The standard SR is the simplest of the three constructions, as it contains the fewest number of structural layers and only has a single dependency relation (between the subject gap and the head). Passive SRs and disposal SRs are both more complicated in terms of the intricate dependency relations inside the VP/vP
On the other hand, the thematic order effect predicts different processing preferences. Since the surface thematic order of a passive SR matches the canonical thematic order in Chinese (i.e.,
One relevant hypothesis about effect locus proposed by Lin (
In addition to the overall predictions of the effects, we thus further distinguish the processing effects in the pre-relativizer regions and the post-relativizer regions. In the pre-relativizer regions, disposal SRs and passive SRs are both expected to take longer to process than standard SRs given greater structural complexity and lower structural frequencies
In the post-relativizer regions, where the existence of relative clauses are clearly indicated by the relativizers and the head nouns, an integration account based on linear locality would predict that standard SRs be easier than both disposal and passive SRs, especially around the head noun region. An integration account based on structural locality would predict no processing differences, or easier processing for standard SRs due to the complexity effect possibly spilled over from the prenominal regions. The effect of thematic template mapping is the only theory that predicts an overturned reading pattern for passive SRs, with passive SRs being the least costly to read. The effect of thematic template mapping is expected to span across multiple post-relativizer regions.
The goal of the present study, in summary, is to examine the effect of thematic orders on Chinese relative clause processing. While Lin (
Forty-eight Taiwanese college students at National Taiwan Normal University, all native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, participated in the experiment. The participants were screened for brain damage. All had normal (or corrected to normal) vision, and were naïve to the purpose of the experiment. Participants gave informed consent to take part in the study. The study protocol was approved by Indiana University's Institutional Review Board.
Twenty sets of sentences were included as the experimental trial, 16 of which were modified based on Gibson and Wu's (
(8) Context:
Yidong gongyuli zhule fangdong yiji liangge fangke
one apartment lived landlord and two tenants
“A landlord and two tenants lived in an apartment.”
Yiwei zhuhu chaoxingle fangdong
one tenant woke up landlord
“One of the tenants woke up the landlord.”
Fangdong ze chaoxingle lingyiwei zhuhu
landlord then woke up the other tenant
“The landlord woke up the other tenant.”
Xiaoming: Wo tingshuo qizhong yiming zhuhu hen gao
I heard among them one tenant very tall
“I heard one of the tenants was very tall.”
Nayiwei zhuhu hen gao?
which.one tenant very tall
“Which tenant was very tall?”
(9) Target sentence with a relative clause:
(i) Standard SR
Xiaomei: Chaoxing fangdong de zhuhu hen gao
woke up landlord
“The tenant that woke up the landlord was very tall.”
(ii) Passive SR
Xiaomei: Bei fangdong chaoxing de zhuhu hen gao
“The tenant that was woken up by the landlord was very tall.”
(iii) Disposal SR
Xiaomei: Ba fangdong chaoxing de zhuhu hen gao
“The tenant that woke the landlord up was very tall.”
Forty-eight additional sets of sentences following a similar format served as fillers. Sixteen of these fillers had relative clauses of various types in them; the remaining 32 fillers did not contain relative clauses. Altogether, 68 sets of contexts and sentences were pseudorandomly presented so that no two experimental trials appeared consecutively. Comprehension questions followed each trial to ensure that participants paid attention in reading the experimental materials. The words used in the relative clauses are provided in the Supplementary Materials.
The experiment followed the standard moving-window self-paced reading design and was conducted using Linger 2.94 (developed by Doug Rohde)
Linear mixed-effects models treating both subjects and items as random effects were fit to both the comprehension accuracy data and the region-by-region reading time data using the lme4 package version 1.1-7 in R (version 3.2.0; Bates et al.,
The mean comprehension accuracy for all items was 85% and the mean accuracy for the experimental trials was 90%. The accuracies of each of the three experimental conditions were 93.05% (passive SRs), 91.83% (standard SRs), and 86.28% (disposal SRs). These results are summarized in Figure
Intercept | |||||||
Passive_SR-Standard_SR | 0.02 | 0.03 | 0.95 | ||||
Passive_SR-Disposal_SR | 0.01 | 0.03 | 0.55 |
In terms of overall comprehension accuracy, passive SRs were comprehended more accurately than both standard SRs and disposal SRs. These results are consistent with the predictions of thematic order effect. Namely, passive SRs, whose thematic order followed the canonical thematic order, were comprehended with greater accuracies than both standard SRs and disposal SRs. No difference was found on the time taken to respond to the comprehension questions.
Since the regions before and after the relativizers are hypothesized to be reflective of different processing effects, average reading times in the two pre-relativizer regions were compared to those in the post-relativizer regions (from the head noun to two regions after the head noun) across the three conditions. Figure
Intercept | ||||||
Passive_SR-Standard_SR | ||||||
Passive_SR-Disposal_SR | −0.03 | 0.02 | −1.58 |
In the pre-relativizer regions, passive SRs were read longer than standard SRs. In the post-relativizer regions, passive SRs were read faster than both the standard SRs and the disposal SRs. The reading time of each target region, including the two pre-relativizer regions, the relativizer, the head noun, and the two regions after the head noun, is further summarized in Figure
Intercept | |||||||||
Passive_SR-Standard_SR | −0.02 | 0.03 | −0.91 | ||||||
Passive_SR-Disposal_SR | 0.00 | 0.03 | 0.07 | ||||||
Intercept | |||||||||
Passive_SR-Standard_SR | −0.04 | 0.03 | −1.11 | −0.06 | 0.04 | −1.78 | |||
Passive_SR-Disposal_SR | −0.06 | 0.04 | −1.55 | 0.01 | 0.04 | 0.20 |
Passive SRs were read longer than standard SRs in both regions inside the relative clause (i.e., the pre-relativizer regions), and faster than disposal SRs from the second region in the prenominal clause to the head noun region
To sum up, standard SRs were read with greatest ease in the earlier regions of the relative clauses. In contrast, in the regions following the relativizer, passive SRs were read more quickly than standard SRs and disposal SRs. The easier comprehension of standard SRs in the pre-relativizer regions is consistent both with integration effects (i.e., standard SRs having less complicated dependencies) and with expectation-based constructional frequency effects (i.e., standard SRs being more frequently experienced than passive SRs). The easier comprehension of passive SRs in the post-relativizer regions, on the other hand, is only consistent with the prediction of thematic template mapping.
The present study contrasted the reading patterns of three types of SRs in Chinese: standard SRs, passive SRs, and disposal SRs. Distinctive reading patterns were observed in the regions before and after the relativizer, suggesting the effects of different processing factors being operative. While the current experimental design intends to motivate relative clauses by using referential contexts, it is still unclear whether a relativized gap has indeed been postulated in the pre-relativizer regions given that a relative-clause parse is but one of several possible parses for the pre-relativizer regions. The structurally-ambiguous pre-relativizer regions showed reading patterns consistent with expectation-based theories of sentence comprehension (e.g., the uncertainty-reduction accounts of Hale,
When the relativizer region is reached, the existence of a relative clause is unambiguously indicated. Consistent with the prediction of the thematic order effect, a passive SR was read faster than the corresponding standard SR and disposal SR given that the thematic order in a passive SR is more frequently experienced than that in a standard SR and that in a disposal SR. All other theoretical factors, by contrast, favor the processing of a standard SR given its structural simplicity and greater constructional frequency. Moreover, this effect of thematic ordering was observed to span across several post-relativizer regions, being attested from the relativizer to the second region after the head noun individually as well as in the sum total. The thematic order effect therefore seems qualitatively different from the gap-filler integration effects, which are usually
In previous research on Chinese SR/OR processing, similar asymmetries have been found before and after the relativizer. Recall that, the thematic order of agent-verb-patient found in an OR, which is similar to that in a passive SR, may give a Chinese OR a processing edge over its SR counterpart owing to the thematic order effect. In contrast to an SR, the pre-relativizer regions of a Chinese OR present a word order (i.e., noun-verb) that matches the canonical order in a Chinese sentence and may be read with greater ease than those of a Chinese SR, whose pre-relativizer verb-noun sequence is non-canonical. In previous studies where relative clauses were not structurally disambiguated, greater processing costs were indeed associated with the pre-relativizer regions of an SR—an effect consistent with the prediction of structural probabilities as well as thematic orders (Hsiao and Gibson,
In the post-relativizer regions, an OR disadvantage has been reported for relative clauses modifying the object of an SVO sequence (Lin and Bever,
The thematic order effect on processing Chinese relative clauses is also supported by two offline studies on aphasic patients' processing of Chinese relative clauses: Law and Leung (
In the current study, the reading patterns of disposal SRs are contrasted with those of standard SRs and passive SRs. Given their lower constructional frequency and greater number of dependencies involving empty categories, disposal SRs were expected to be the most difficult to process. Indeed, the reading patterns in the present study showed that disposal SRs were the most difficult among the three SRs examined in both the pre- and post-relativizer regions. Given the additional dependencies and lower structural probability associated with passive SRs, it may be expected that they should be equally difficult to process. This result was only obtained for the pre-relativizer regions, where passive SRs were read longer than the standard SRs. In the post-relativizer regions, the reading times of passive SRs were shorter than those of standard SRs and disposal SRs. This can be taken as evidence that the canonical thematic order found in a passive SR induced shorter reading times in its post-relativizer regions. The fact that structural probability effects and thematic template effects have been observed in different regions of a relative clause does not imply that these processes are only operative in different regions of a sentence. Taken together, the results from these different studies suggest that the surprisal-related effect and the thematic template effect are both active and can be independently observed in different regions of a Chinese sentence.
The effect of thematic ordering on sentence comprehension can be understood as a processing heuristic used for efficiently coming up with thematic interpretations for sentences. The sentence processor keeps track of the linear positions of the content words in a sentence in forming thematic interpretations. The dominant thematic order of a language may serve as an “interpretation template,” to which the content words of a sentence are matched. The comprehension of sentences with more complex structures such as relative clauses can be facilitated by matching thematic orders against the dominant thematic templates. Since the dominant thematic template in Chinese is
These effects of thematic order are in line with several existing theories of sentence processing. The idea of thematic templates has a similar flavor to Bever's (
In conclusion, the reading time data for three sub-types of Chinese SRs reported in the present study supported two processes that are involved in the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses. Before reaching the relativizer, where the structure of the sentence is temporarily ambiguous, expectation-based incremental processing theories such as those of Hale (
The critical evidence for the effect of thematic ordering comes from the easier processing of passive SRs, whose thematic role order conforms to the canonical thematic order of Chinese. Despite their more complex structural dependencies and lower constructional frequency compared with standard SRs, passive SRs were nevertheless comprehended with the greatest accuracy and processed with the shortest reading times in the post-relativizer regions. The current study therefore suggests that the comprehension of relative clauses in Chinese is sensitive to both the structural probabilities of constituents as well as the thematic orders involved in the relative clauses. In our effort to understand relative clause comprehension, it is important to take both of these factors into account.
The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
This research was partially funded by Indiana University's Office of the Vice Provost for Research through the Faculty Research Support Program. I thank Aaron Albin, Yu-Jung Lin, and Chung-Lin Yang for their research assistance.
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at:
1The classification of these structure-based accounts as working memory accounts is my own. These original structure-based accounts did not necessarily specify the working memory component.
2The thematic template theory is of a similar flavor to the NVN strategy of Bever (
3In these examples and throughout the paper,
4We adopt a movement/raising analysis for the tree diagrams of subject-extracted and object-extracted relative clauses in Chinese (see Aoun and Li,
5Alternatively,
6Like
7The integration cost associated with passive SRs may also need to consider the base-generated lowermost trace position, which is linearly closest to the head NP. Even though this short linear dependency may exist between the passivized NP trace and the head noun, it does not preclude the processor from establishing a dependency between the trace NP and the subject gap, which involves a longer linear distance than the dependency in a standard SR.
8It is not a simple matter to determine whether a passive SR or a disposal SR is more complex. In terms of the number of dependencies and structural layers, a passive SR is more complex. In terms of the number of different NP identities involved in the dependencies, a disposal SR is more complex. Moreover, while both kinds of SRs exhibit nested dependencies, these dependencies are all associated with the same NP for passive SRs. This factor may make the construction of such dependencies easier to process than the multiple distinct dependencies of a disposal SR. In this sense, then, disposal SRs may be the more complex of the two.
9The Sinica Treebank can be found at the following URL:
10Constructional frequency is but one way to make expectation-based predictions. Alternatively, it is also possible to conduct a sentence completion task to generate word-by-word structural expectations (as has been done in Jäger et al.,
11See
12As a caveat to the advantage of standard SRs observed in the pre-relativizer regions, the disposal SRs and the passive SRs involve an additional function word (i.e.,
13In experiments requesting participants to identify the thematic roles of subjects and objects, Ferreira (