Subject Preference In Chinese Relative Clause Processing

Relative Clause (RC) is a complex grammatical phenomenon, whose structure has particularity. Hence, RC is widely applied in psycholinguistics as the effectual method to investigate human beings’comprehension and production of the complex sentence structure. At present, the studies on Chinese RC abroad and at home are on the increase. Some scholars thinks that in Chinese, subject relative clauses are easier than object relative clauses, while others hold the contradictory opinion.The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the Chinese relative clause processing using the modified Maze task which includes a pre-context sentence. Via processing Chinese relative clause in the incremental mode, the thesis analyzes the accuracy and reaction time by both normal and aphasic participants. The thesis attempts to demonstrate the processing of Chinese subject relative clause is easier than that of Chinese object relative clause. Both of the two experiment data show that, the RCs, head word, verb and object in main clause, take shorter time in processing in subject RCs than that in the object RCs. The result in this thesis demonstrates the preference for processing the subject in Chinese RCs, which supports the universality of subject preference in languages.This thesis is composed of five parts. Chapter One is the introduction, which presents the background, purpose of the current research, and the framework of the thesis. The emphasis of this chapter is on the subject preference. Chapter Two is literature review. It systematically introduces the concept and the categorization of the relative clause, the asymmetry in processing the relative clause, and the related theories. Chapter Three is the methodology of this thesis, namely, Maze Task. This chapter deliberately presents experiment design of Maze task, experimental materials, subjects selection, and the procedure of the experiment. Chapter Four analyzes the result of the experiment based on related theories. Chapter Five draws the conclusion that the Chinese sentence processing depends on the readers’previous experience. According to the relevant corpus studies, there is also the evidence that Chinese possesses the subject preference because Chinese subject relative clause owns a higher frequency than the object relative clauses.