A Study Of Mandarin Garden Path Sentences

This thesis investigates one type of Mandarin garden path sentences from apsycholinguistic perspective. The paper aims to explore the age-related effects and theeffects of lexical factors, i.e. phrase length and phrase frequency, on sentencecomprehension.Garden path sentences form an interesting linguistic and psycholinguistic topicbecause our understanding of processing these sentences is significant in the fields ofhuman cognition, artificial intelligence, language acquisition and foreign languageteaching. It is especially important because it shows how processing proceeds in realtime, i.e. it shows evidence about the construction of syntactic structure while thesentence is being uttered. Much previous research has been done on Englishgarden-path sentences. The thesis aims to experimentally investigate one garden pathstructure in Mandarin, examine how it is processed, and find out what are the factorsinvolved in this process.30subjects participated in one experiment, using the DMDXsoftware package, in which they were asked to answer true/false questions, aiming atuncovering whether they had syntactically restructured the garden-path sentencescorrectly.The results of the experiment permit several conclusions:1) a residual ofmisinterpretation can be observed but the individual differences are great;2) nativespeakers are able to resolve the temporary ambiguity in all target stimuli;3) phraselength and lexical frequency have obvious effects on reaction time, but bore littlerelationship with comprehension accuracy;4) the age group <40-49> achieved thehighest accuracy.These findings provide Mandarin evidence for Christianson’s (2006)―good-enough‖hypothesis and shed light on how the complex structure is learnt. To further explore the sentence processing mechanism, more garden path structuresshould be investigated in future research using a variety of approaches.