The Vitality Effect Of Core Nouns In The Processing Of Chinese Subject And Object Relative Clauses

In sentences,syntax refers to the principles that words form sentences,and semantics refers to the meaning information of words and sentences.Syntax and semantics are two important factors affecting sentence processing,but how they affect and interact in sentence processing have been debated to date.According to syntactic priority processing theory,sentence processing is modular and hierarchical.People first construct sentence structures under the guidance of syntactic principles,and then use non-syntactic information,such as vocabulary,semantics and context,to modify and supplement the sentence structures.According to constraint and restriction theory,sentence processing is carried out in a parallel way,in which semantic and syntactic information work together in the process of sentence processing.Because of the particularity of its syntactic structure,relative clause has become an effective material to explore the mechanism of syntactic and semantic functions in sentence processing.A lot of researches have been carried out on the cognitive process of relative clauses to reveal the mechanism of syntax and semantics in sentence processing(Jin,2018).This study further explored the above issues by designing three experiments with Chinese subject and object relative clauses(SRCs vs.ORCs)as critical materials,meanwhile we manipulated the animacy configuration of the critical noun phrases(NPs)in the sentences.120 preschoolers around 3-6 years old,separately 40 children from small,middle and large classes,participated in Experiment 1,through sentence-picture matching paradigm,aiming to investigate the cognitive characteristics of relative clauses and how animacy configuration affect the cognitive process.50 college students and 29 elderly subjects separately joined Experiment 2 and 3,though eye-tracking method,aiming to further study whether Chinese SRCs are more difficult than ORCs or not and whether there is animacy effect in their processing.Additionally,the data of Experiment 2 and 3 were co-analyzed to further examine the interaction among sentence type,animacy configuration and age period.The results are as follows:Experiment 1 found that the processing penalty of Chinese subject and object relative clauses decreased with the increase of children's age.As the age went on,children had different performance.There were no significant differences between processing difficulty of SRCs and ORCs for children of small and middle classes,but for children of large classes,ORCs were more easier than SRCs.In addition,animacy property of the critical NPs affected the understanding of RCs in children,which shows that different animacy configuration of NPs has different difficulty in processing.For the large class,ORCs with inanimate-animate configuration were more difficult than ORCs with animate-inanimate configuration,while it shows the opposite trend for SRCs.The findings confirmed the hypothesis of thematic fitness and the theory of empirical frequency distribution.What's more,under the condition of inanimate-animate configuration and SRCs,the comprehension rate of small class is lower than that of middle and large class,and there was no significant difference between middle and large class,differently,under the condition of animate-inanimate configuration and ORCs,there was no significant difference between small and middle class,but they both were comprehending worse than large class.Experiment 2 shows that for adult college students,processing of SRCs and ORCs were influenced more by language experience than animacy configuration.Compared with animacy effect,the effect of language experience is greater.When participants' language experience was relatively insufficient,it was easier to process for sentences with reasonable thematic relations.Therefore,sentences with animacy head NPs were easier to process.Meanwhile,the eye-movement results showed that the processing of SRCs were easier than ORCs.Experiment 3 found no significant effects of sentence type and animacy configuration.The possible reason for this result might be the aging of cognitive abilities for the elderly.Results of first fixation duration showed that animacy of NPs of the embedded clause affected the processing of the elderly,but animacy of the head NPs did not affect the processing performance of the elderly.Conjoint analysis of Experiments 2 and 3 showed that the main effect of age is stable.Compared with young subjects,the ability of the elderly to process RCs was significantly aging,and the aging effect did not change with the changing of animacy configuration.Compared with the elderly,the young subjects were more influenced by animacy configuration.Both the comprehension accuracy and the eye-movement results showed that language experience and the fitness of thematic role influenced the processing of RCs.