The Role of Animacy and Structural Information in Relative Clause Attachment: Evidence From Chinese

Frontiers in Psychology
Nayoung KwonAili Zhang

Abstract

We report one production and one comprehension experiment investigating the effect of animacy in relative clause attachment in Chinese. Experiment 1 involved a fill-in-the-blank task that manipulated the order of an animate noun phrase in a complex NP construction. The results showed that while low attachment responses exceeded high attachment responses overall (cf. Shen, 2006), a tendency exists to attach a relative clause to an animate NP in Chinese (cf. Desmet et al., 2002). Experiment 2 used a rating task to examine the interplay between animacy and structural information by manipulating the order of the animate NP as well as the relative clause type (i.e., subject vs. object relative clauses). The results showed that the animate NP modification tendency found in Experiment 1 was limited to subject-relative clauses and that no animacy-related effect was found with object-relative clauses. These results are incompatible with purely structural parsing strategies such as Late Closure (Frazier, 1987) and the Predicate Proximity Principle (Gibson et al., 1996). Instead, the current results suggest that attachment ambiguity resolution in Chinese relative clauses is sensitive to animacy as well as structural information.

References

Oct 1, 1993·Language and Speech·M Carreiras, C Clifton
Aug 22, 2002·The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. A, Human Experimental Psychology·Timothy DesmetConstantijn De Baecke
Apr 15, 2003·Journal of Psycholinguistic Research·Sun-Ah Jun
Nov 5, 2003·Cognition·Franny Hsiao, Edward Gibson
Jan 1, 2008·Journal of Memory and Language·Silvia P Gennari, Maryellen C Macdonald
Jan 10, 2014·Journal of Memory and Language·Dale J BarrHarry J Tily
Jul 18, 2014·Cognition·Nino Grillo, João Costa

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