An Experimental Study On Thematic Order Of Contextual Sentences Influencing The Processing Of Chinese Relative Clauses

The thematic order consistency is one of those factors influencing the processing of Chinese relative clauses.It refers to two conditions:when thematic orders of contextual and target sentences are both Agent-action-Patient and Agent-Patient-action.Gibson&Wu(2003)and Lin(2014,2015)found thematic order consistency would facilitate the processing of Chinese RCs.However,they studied thematic order effect with same contextual sentences whose thematic order was consistent,but they did not examine this effect with contextual sentences whose thematic order was inconsistent.Thus,this thesis aims at studying the effect of different thematic configurations in contextual sentences on the processing of Chinese relative clauses and testing theoretical predictions on sentence processing.This research adopts a self-paced reading experiment,takes the configuration of two contextual sentences as an independent variable whose thematic orders are inconsistent,and takes reaction times of processing subject-extracted RCs and object-extracted RCs as an index.We aim at examining whether thematic order differences of contextual sentences influence the thematic order consistency effect.This thesis attempts to answer two questions:(1)Whether thematic order differences of contextual sentences will affect thematic order consistency effect?(2)With those contextual sentences,what is the mechanism of processing Chinese relative clauses?Forty undergraduates in grade 3 from Hunan University took part in the experiment.The contextual and sematic content of experimental materials was created based on Lin(2014)'s.The experiment adopts between-group designs.The contextual sentence configurations in experimental materials include SVO+Ba and Ba+SVO,which match the two types of RCs.Experimental materials programmed by E-prime 2,0,were presented on the screen,with the contextual sentences presented sentence by sentence and the target sentence word by word.All materials were presented randomly on the computer screen.Participants were all required to read those sentences and then to answer a comprehension question following by.All the behavior data was collected and rearranged according to the order of the contextual sentence configuration,and then analyzed through SPSS software.The results showed that:(1)On RTs of each word,no effect of relative clause type was found(ts<1.96,ps>0.05);in the regions before head noun,numerical subject-extracted RC advantage was found and the mean RT in the regions before head noun was shorter in subject-extracted relative clauses than in object-extracted relative clauses(407.63 vs.418.15 ms).(2)With Ba+SVO condition,on RTs of answering comprehension questions,there exists an effect of relative clause type[t(178)=2.359,p=0.02<0.05]that participants respond to questions following object-extracted RCs significantly faster than to those following object-extracted RCs.(3)Numerical subject-extracted RCs reading advantage was found in the regions preceding the head noun,and such difference reached greatest in the second word region inside the RC.Above all:(1)Thematic order consistency effect does not exist when provided with contextual sentences whose thematic orders are inconsistent.(2)The numerical subject-extracted RC advantage provides supporting evidence to the expectation-based frequency theory that a processor uses frequency guiding their processing of sentence.(3)The Ba+SVO configuration helps people in answering questions following the subject-extracted RCs.