The Psycholinguistic Research Of Chinese Zero-anaphora Resolution

Anaphora and its resolution plays an important role in the reader's cognitive processing of the discourse.This research has been a hot topic in linguistics especially psycholinguistics.Compared with the English language,the Chinese language tends to be economical.In terms of anaphora,the latter tends to omit as much linguistic information as possible provided that the Chinese provides sufficient linguistic context,thus the Chinese discourse enjoys very high frequency of zero-anaphora.As a result,its resolution constitutes a key problem to the readers' interpretation of the Chinese discourse.Regrettably,the researches abroad on zero-anaphora resolution have been done by a few overseas Chinese scholars.So far, fewer studies of this aspect have been made.The Chinese scholars focus their growing attention on this topic,yet they engage themselves in their studies mainly based on pragmatic analysis.Very few researches have been conducted through psycholinguistic experiments.This dissertation,by introducing how topic factors(topic continuing and topic discontinuing) restrain the reader's interpretation of zero-anaphora resolution, intends to make a probe into the reader's psychological reality,time course and factors affecting Chinese zero-anaphora resolution from the perspective of psycholinguistics.It also gives a tentative interpretation of this linguistic phenomenon in the Chinese discourse.The thesis consists of three researches supported by five experiments.Researchâ… :On the Reader's Psychological Reality in Interpreting Chinese Zero-anaphora.The present study means to probe into the reader's psycholinguistic reality in his interpreting Chinese zero-anaphora by observing the subject' responses from his recognition of this linguistic phenomenon to his complementation of the corresponding pronouns.This research includes two sub-experiments:Experiment 1 on the reader's psychological reality in recognizing and interpreting zero-anaphora in terms of topic continuing;Experiment 2 with regard to topic discontinuing.Researchâ…¡:On the Readers' Time Course in the Chinese Zero-anaphora Resolution.The research attempts to approach time discourse by observing readers' different responses to probing words at different places of the Chinese course.It consists of two sub-experiments:Experiment 3 on time course in terms of topic continuing;Experiment 4 on time course concerning topic discontinuing. Researchâ…¢:On the Factors Affecting Chinese Zero-anaphora Resolution.By applying reaction time probing technology,we particularly approach how active/passive voice and prior information situation have some effect on the readers' interpretation of zero-anaphora.We investigated kinds of its resolution.The response time in Researchâ… conforms to our hypothesis.That is,with topic continuing and topic discontinuing present,no significant differences in subject' responses are showed in Chinese zero-anaphora resolution.Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 indicate readers' reading time does not agree with our hypothesis: due to referential inconsistency,the longest time is required for all-pronoun-inclusive sentence comprehension;the longer for zero-anaphora sentence;and the shortest for normal sentence reading.So far as reading time is concerned,Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 seem to demonstrate much similarity in terms of zero-anaphora resolution mechanism,thus emerges the first mention effect:in Experiment 1 and Experiment 2,whatever sentence types they may be,the readers spend more time in understanding them than the rest of sentences.Researchâ…¡shows that with topic continuing present,a mental search for zero-anaphora is on in its sentence groups,because after reading a whole discourse or sentence groups,the subject' response potentiality in their mental representation of real antecedents is shorter than that in their interpretation of those which follow verbs.We infer that the time progressing for zero-anaphora resolution is an exhaustive search.However,With topic discontinuing present,the search for the object of zero-anaphora begins with the appearance of the corresponding verb.The theoretical explanation for this is that the subject' response potentiality in their mental representation of real antecedents which follow the verb of the zero-anaphora sentences is shorter than that after they have finished sentence groups or the whole discourse.Thus,we conclude that the zero-anaphora resolution in terms of topic discontinuing is a heuristic search.Researchâ…¢indicates the significant effect of active/passive voice,i.e.the first mention effect.But we have not found that prior information situations have a prominent effect on Chinese zero-anaphora resolution.This point does not satisfy our expectations.This dissertation have made a tentative study of Chinese zero-anaphora resolution through an analysis of data collected from 200 subjects.We hold that in the Chinese discourse reading process,specific zero-anaphora resolution,that is,the judgment of the object of zero-anaphora,is a complex cognitive process.We also maintain that with quantities of cognitive schemes and scripts in our minds,and with the help of encyclopaedic knowledge,grammar structure,linguistic context and other factors,we Chinese can identify the object which zero-anaphora signify.It is obvious that like pronoun anaphora resolution,zero-anaphora resolution in Chinese is a quick and automatic process.