Processing Chinese relative clauses: evidence for the subject-relative advantage

Abstract

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.

Figure 1. The distributions of the raw, log-transformed, and negative-reciprocal transformed data at the head noun in the Gibson and Wu dataset.

The raw reading times were the ones reported in the paper. The bottom-right plot show the results of the Box-Cox procedure; the procedure suggests a reciprocal transform for stabilizing variance.

Figure 2. The distributions of residuals from maximal linear mixed effects models for the raw, log-transformed, and negative-reciprocal transformed data at the head noun in the Gibson and Wu dataset.

Figure 3. Experiment 1: The raw reading times at the five regions of interest in the relative clause types, with 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 4. Experiment 2: The raw reading times at the five regions of interest in the relative clause types, with 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 5. Experiment 3: The raw reading times at the five regions of interest in the relative clause types, with 95% confidence intervals.

Figure 6. Experiment 3 and the original Gibson and Wu dataset combined: The raw reading times at the five regions of interest in the relative clause types, with 95% confidence intervals.