The Parallelism Effect In Chinese Sentence Comprehension

In sentence comprehension, when two clauses or phrases with the same structure andhave same grammatical function, we call that it is a parallel structure. Frazier, Taft, Roeper,&Clifton (1984) found parallelism effect in parallel structure of English sentences. Theparallelism effect is a phenomenon that the second element of a coordinate structure isprocessed faster when it parallels the first element in comparison than it does not parallel thefirst element. In this paper we present two eye-tracking studies of Chinese, to clarify whetheror not parallelism effect is found in Chinese sentences.Experiment1was conducted in order to investigate the parallelism effect in coordinatestructures of Chinese. The conjunction of the linked verbal sentence is “and”. Throughtransform the structure before the word of "and" change the relationship between the twoelements. In order to investigate whether the parallelism effect could be found in parallelstructure, we design “parallel” and “not parallel” relationships in compound sentences. Inaddition, we added a third condition in which the noun modifier consists of a numeral. Thisexperiment showing that the reading time in the parallel structure was short.Experiment2was conducted in order to investigate the parallelism effect in linked verbalsentences. Parallel structure not only exists in the compound, but in linked verbal sentences.We want to know whether the parallelism effect could be found in linked verbal sentences.There are a lot of differences about this question in previous researches. In experiment2wewill address the question of whether the parallelism effect is indeed limited to coordination, orwhether it can be found in other syntactic environments as well. In this experiment, a readingtime advantage was not found when the second noun phrase had the same structure as thefirst.Basing on the study result, some inclusions could be come to:(1) Parallelism effect can be found in Chinese sentence comprehension. Parallel structureincrease the syntactic information contained in the second element of a parallel structure. Thisreduces the memory load imposed by the second element, thus freeing processing resources,and then sentence comprehension could be speeded.(2) Parallelism effect can not be found in linked verbal sentences and it is restricted tocoordinate structures. Parallelism effect is not a general priming effect.