The Role Of Animacy Information In Processing Chinese Relative Clauses

As Chinese differs from alphabetic languages like English in many aspects such as vocabulary and grammar, many linguistic laws found in western languages can’t apply equally in Chinese. For the study of relative clauses, subject relative clauses have been proved in many languages to be easier to process than object relative clauses. However, this universal subject preference among languages has been challenged by researches in Chinese. And disputes on the processing difficulty of subject and object relative clauses have not been settled among researchers.This research makes a comparative analysis on the processing of subject-extracted and object-extracted relative clauses modifying sentence subject in Mandarin Chinese, based on event-related potentials (ERPs). The two relative clauses have been examined on their comprehension difficulty through two experiments. By manipulating the animacy feature of the arguments of the clause verb, the effect of animacy information on relative clause processing is analyzed.Experiment1examines the processing difference between subject relative clauses and object relative clauses with both arguments of the clause verb being animate nouns. ERP results showed significant difference between the two kinds of relative clause in the clause regions. Subject-extracted relative clauses were more difficult to comprehend, with higher ERP amplitude. However, no significant difference was found at the relativizer "DE" and the head noun. A slight difference was shown at the main verb, and object relative clauses were more difficult to process with larger P600amplitude being activated. Experiment2adopts stimulus sentences of contrastive argument animacy in order to investigate the influence of animacy information. Subject relative clauses were more difficult to process in the pre-relativizer and the relativizer regions. Object relative clauses were found to be more difficult to process in the head noun and main verb regions. This can be accounted by Perspective Shift theory, as inanimate head-words are less often used in the thematic role.And by comparing the results with those from experiment1, animacy information was proved to affect the processing course by contributing to role assignment. Contrastive argument animacy makes role assignment easier and changes the difference between subject and object relative clauses. Contrastive animacy reduces the processing difficulty of relative clauses in some word regions and increases the processing difficulty in some other regions. The findings in the two experiments confirm the important role animacy information plays in sentence processing in Mandarin Chinese. Animacy information is referred to immediately in thematic assignment when sentence processing begins...