Chien-Jer Charles Lin

A controversy in the sentence processing literature regarding relative-clause processing was raised by Hsiao and Gibson’s (2003) study of Chinese relative clauses. Their study suggested that, contrary to the patterns found in all other languages, Chinese relative clauses showed a processing preference for object extractions. This result posed a challenge to sentence processing theories that attempt to account for crosslinguistic patterns regarding relative-clause processing. In this article, we argue that Hsiao and Gibson’s claim of an object preference in Mandarin was invalid. It was not supported by the experimental data they provided, as their experiment was confounded by a crucial factor. We cite two sets of experimental evidence from Mandarin–the self-paced reading of regular relative clauses and that of possessor relative clauses. Both experiments showed a preference for subject extractions in Mandarin. As the controversy caused by Mandarin is removed, we discuss an incremental minimalist parsing theory that accounts for this universal parsing preference.

Chinese relative clauses are an important test case for pitting the predictions of expectation-based accounts against those of memory-based theories. The memory-based accounts predict that object relatives are easier to process than subject relatives because, in object relatives, the distance between the relative clause verb and the head noun is shorter. By contrast, expectation-based accounts such as surprisal predict that the less frequent object relative should be harder to process. In previous studies on Chinese relative clause comprehension, local ambiguities may have rendered a comparison between relative clause types uninterpretable. We designed experimental materials in which no local ambiguities confound the comparison. We ran two experiments (self-paced reading and eye-tracking) to compare reading difficulty in subject and object relatives which were placed either in subject or object modifying …

This dissertation investigates the role of grammar and parsing in processing relative clauses across languages. A parsing theory called the Incremental Minimalist Parser (IMP), which parses sentences incrementally from left to right, is sketched based on the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 2001, 2005). We provide sentence processing evidence which supported a universal parsing theory that is structure-based. According to IMP (and other structure-based theories), a gap located at the subject position is more easily accessed than a gap located at the object position in both head-initial (e.g. English) and head-final (e.g. Mandarin) relative clauses. Experiment 1 (self-paced reading tasks) showed a processing advantage for Mandarin relative clauses that involved subject extractions over object extractions, consistent with the universal subject preference found in all other languages. Experiments 2 to 4 (naturalness ratings, paraphrasing tasks, and self-paced reading tasks) focused on possessor relative clauses. When the possessor gap was located at the subject position (i.e. in passives), a possessive relation was easier to construct than when the gap was located at an object position (i.e. in canonical constructions and sentences involving BA). The results of Experiments 1-4 suggested that processing accounts based on locality and canonicity, but not on syntactic structure, cannot account for the processing preferences of filler-gap relations in relative clauses. Experiment 5 (self-paced reading tasks) investigated whether the surface NVN sequence of relative clauses at sentence-initial positions induced garden path, and whether the animacy of the …

This chapter explores the issue of garden-path in the comprehension of head-final relative clauses (particularly in Chinese and Japanese). Experimental data from two self-paced reading studies in Chinese are compared, showing the existence of a main-clause garden-path effect on the object-extracted relative clause modifying the object of the matrix clause. Different approaches adopted to indicate an upcoming relative clause (and thus to avoid a potential garden-path effect) are evaluated, including using internal relative-clause markers, classifier-noun mismatches, relativization-inducing contexts and providing specific instructions on the existence and position of relative clauses in the matrix clauses. The garden-path effect associated with a relative clause can be avoided by using a classifier-noun mismatch along with a carefully constructed referential context. Experiments giving specific instructions on …

This article examines the special processing characteristics of head-final relative clauses. As head-final relative clauses superficially resemble other prenominal modifiers such as adjectivals, stative verbs, and adjunctive/complement clauses, their status as a distinct kind has constantly been challenged. We present existing processing evidence to show that head-final relative clauses should be distinguished from other prenominal modifiers as they do involve structure-based filler-gap integrations (like those of head-initial relative clauses) and observe universal extraction effects. The evidence includes:(a) processing differences between possessive relative clauses and adverbial relative clauses in Mandarin;(b) processing differences between gapped relative clauses and adjunct clauses with null pronouns in Korean; and (c) subject-extracted relative clauses being easier to process than object-extracted relative clauses in head-final relativization.

This paper revisits the effect of lexical ambiguity in word recognition, which has been controversial as previous research reported advantage, disadvantage, and null effects. We discuss factors that were not consistently treated in previous research (e.g., the level of lexical ambiguity investigated, parts of speech of the experimental stimuli, and the choice of non-words) and report on a lexical decision experiment with Chinese nouns in which ambiguous nouns with homonymic and/or metaphorical meanings were contrasted with unambiguous nouns. An ambiguity advantage effect was obtained—Chinese nouns with multiple meanings were recognized faster than those with only one meaning. The results suggested that both homonymic and metaphorical meanings are psychologically salient semantic levels actively represented in the mental lexicon. The results supported a probability-based model of random …

This paper investigates the comprehension of relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese, where noun phrases are head-final and both an object-relative advantage and a subject-relative advantage have been previously reported. Two self-paced reading experiments are reported, suggesting that the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses is sensitive to the thematic role orders both in the relative clauses and in the preceding discourse context. Experiment 1 showed that the PATIENT-action-AGENT order of a passive sentence in the context did not facilitate either the action-PATIENT-AGENT order of a subject relative clause or the AGENT-action-PATIENT order of an object relative clause. Experiment 2 showed that only the canonical SVO sentence (not the bǎ sentence) in Mandarin Chinese, which had full thematic order overlap with the object relatives induced sustained faster reading times of an object relative …

This article explores the construction of filler-gap dependencies in Chinese possessor relative clauses (PRCs), which are different from typical relative clauses (RCs) considered in the literature because Chinese PRCs contain no overt missing arguments (ie gaps). As Chinese RCs are prenominal, the gaps precede the head noun fillers. It has been suggested that when the gaps are close to the filler, the dependency is easier to construct; there is, thus, a processing advantage for object RCs over subject RCs (Hsiao & Gibson, 2003). The PRC data presented show that even in Chinese, a language with RCs that are head-final, it is possible to have a subject gap preference (over object) despite the fact that the subject is further away from the filler. Three experiments confirmed this subject preference with respect to naturalness and grammaticality ratings (Experiment 1), paraphrasing tasks (Experiment 2), and self-paced reading tasks (Experiment 3). The results support a theory of gap-searching which operates top down. Issues regarding locality and canonicity will also be discussed.

In Lin & Bever (2006), we pointed out that Hsiao and Gibson’s (2003) study was confounded by DEPENDENCY TYPES across the conditions. They compared only between doubly-embedded subject RCs (a) and doubly-embedded object RCs (d), and found double object RCs read faster. This was actually an effect of serial dependencies (double ORCs) being easier than nested dependencies (double SRCs). It says nothing about the extraction effects.

This chapter explores the psychological basis of lexical ambiguity. We compare three ways of meaning calculation, including meanings listed in dictionaries, meanings provided by human subjects, and meanings analyzed by a linguistic theory. Two experiments were conducted using both Chinese and English data. The results suggest that while the numbers of meanings obtained by different methods are significantly different from one another, they are also significantly correlated. Different ways of meaning calculation produce distinct numbers of meanings, though on a relative scale, words with more meanings tend to have greater numbers of meanings throughout. Dictionary meanings are distinguished from meanings obtained from subjects both in content and in number.

Calculating and representing a word's meaning is of central concern in lexicography, natural language processing, and psycholinguistics. A common difficulty researchers from these disciplines face is: when are two meanings the senses of a word, and when should they be treated as senses of distinct words? A more subtle yet related question is: what should and what should not count as the sense of a word? Different dictionaries frequently have unique ways of treating lexical meanings, depending on the theoretical and functional considerations lexicographers have in mind; for example, some dictionaries emphasize presenting a word's meaning with an eye to facilitating readers to understand the daily usages of that word, while others focus on providing the history of that word and listing overall definitions (archaic or not). Therefore, in constructing a contemporary model of lexical semantics that reflect people's actual semantic knowledge, it is not congenial to totally rely on dictionaries. This paper aims at discussing the theoretical issues in constructing a lexical semantic theory that is linguistically, cognitively, and psychologically valid. It deliberates on such issues as polysemy and homonymy, metaphor and metonymy, and their implications in constructing a theoretical model that reflects language users' lexical semantic knowledge. This model further makes possible the calculation of word senses, based on which we design psycholinguistic experiments to examine a long-debated effect on lexical polysemy--the ambiguity advantage effect. Therefore in this paper, we start off from a cognitive lexical semantic theory and arrive at the …

This chapter explores the syntax, semantics, and the online processing of (in) alienable nouns. An inalienable noun is inherently relational, taking a syntactic argument and assigning the thematic role of possessor to this argument. An alienable possessive relation is composed by inserting a functional phrase headed by a context-dependent variable. Self-paced reading evidence suggested that possessive relations involving inalienable nouns are more easily constructed than those involving alienable nouns.

Decades of psycholinguistic research focused mainly on the processing of English relative clauses such as (4-6), namely the subject relatives, object relatives, and reduced relatives. Various studies have repeatedly demonstrated that subject and object relative clauses such as (4-5) induce different processing costs. For instance, self-paced reading

Nasal endings are cross-linguistically among the most susceptible to change. Hajek (1997) discusses the universal patterns of nasalization in various Italian languages in relation to vowel height and vowel quality. Chinese nasal endings have also undergone merging and splitting from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese, and from Middle Chinese to Modern Chinese (Li, 1999). Historical linguists of Chinese have had everlasting interest in the reconstruction of Chinese nasal endings. Hypotheses about nasalization were made (eg Chen, 1979); various researchers followed up examining these hypotheses by studying nasal endings in different Chinese dialects (Zee, 1985; Hess, 1990). Some researchers also looked into nasal endings in dictionaries of Old and Middle Chinese compiled in ancient China, and showed the early traces of instability (Chen, 1991). The nasal endings in Standard Mandarin currently spoken in Taiwan are not exempt from this instability. Previous research by Chen (1991) collected data from Mandarin speakers of different age groups in Taipei, and showed a tendency for–in to merge into–ing, and for–eng to merge into–en. However, Chen (1991) only looked at nasal endings following two vowels/i/and/\/, and the judgments of whether a syllable ended in–n or–ng were made solely depending on the experimenters’ ears.