Study On The Processing Of Chinese Subject-Object Extracted Relative Clauses

Subject-object asymmetry is a very common linguistic phenomenon. One frequently cited piece of evidence is the fact that an object-extracted relative clause is generally more difficult to process than a subject-extracted relative clause in English and many other head-initial languages. Researchers have proved this phenomenon in both normal adults and aphasic patients by using different methodology, such as eye movement tracking, self-paced reading, sentence-picture matching and the like. Different hypotheses and theories have been put forward to explain this subject-object asymmetry in English relative clause processing and they turned out to be successful in a large sense. However, a well-developed theory is required not only to explain phenomenon observed in one language but to explain all the relevant facts, especially those found in languages with a different linguistic profile. Chinese happens to be one of those languages. Like in English, the canonical word order in Chinese is SVO, but the two languages differ in that the antecedent precedes the relative clause in English, while it follows the relative clause in Chinese. This linear difference has resulted in different predictions as to the comparative difficulty in the processing of a Chinese subject-extracted relative clause and an object-extracted relative clause. Therefore we are able to make use of this opportunity to check these hypotheses against data we collect in Chinese subjects. Since some researchers have already gathered this kind of data from normal subjects, this study aims to provide neurolinguistic evidence by examining aphasic patients' comprehension of relative clauses.In this study, two aphasic patients participated in the three experiments. In Experiment 1, an auditory sentence-picture matching task was used to compare the processing difficulty of Chinese subject-extracted and object-extracted relative clause structures with the two critical NPs being common nouns. The investigation showed that one of our patients YP made significantly more mistakes on SRCs. The other patient LY, though not significantly, made more mistakes on SRCs as well. This result provides further evidence for the claim that a Chinese subject-extracted RC is more difficult to process than an object-extracted RC. In Experiment 2, the same type of task was adopted as in Experiment 1 but the animacy of the two critical NPs were manipulated by using an animate NP as the subject and an inanimate NP the object of the relative clause. It was found that there was no significant difference in the two patients' performance on the two sentence types. This indicates that animacy plays an important role in the comprehension process of relative clauses. In Experiment 3, an auditory sentence comprehension task was used to examine whether a personal pronoun is another important element in the relative clause comprehension process. By doing so, trial sentences with one critical NP being a pronoun while the other a common noun were used. The results showed that the patients' performance on both sentences types was not significantly different either. This finding suggests that like "animacy", the personal pronoun may be another variable that affect the comprehension difficulty.Taking together the results from the three experiments, we found our Broca's patient exhibited an interesting pattern in the comprehension of the two relative clause types: his performance was generally at chance level on the subject-extracted type while above chance on the object-extracted type. This indicates that the cortical area associated with Broca's aphasia might play a very important role in the analysis of syntactic constructions that involves movement of certain sentence constituents from their original S-V-O position in the D-structure to a new position in the S-structure.Since trial sentences used in current study are limited in quantity, more testing items and trial sentences are suggested for future studies. Group studies on aphasic patients' comprehension of relative clause are also expected to produce fruitful results.