TY  - JOUR
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
A1  - Chen, Zhong
A1  - Li, Qiang
A1  - Guo, Gueilan
T1  - Processing chinese relative clauses - evidence for the subject-relative advantage
T2  - PLoS one
N2  - A general fact about language is that subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. Recently, several self-paced reading studies have presented surprising evidence that object relatives in Chinese are easier to process than subject relatives. We carried out three self-paced reading experiments that attempted to replicate these results. Two of our three studies found a subject-relative preference, and the third study found an object-relative advantage. Using a random effects bayesian meta-analysis of fifteen studies (including our own), we show that the overall current evidence for the subject-relative advantage is quite strong (approximate posterior probability of a subject-relative advantage given the data: 78-80%). We argue that retrieval/integration based accounts would have difficulty explaining all three experimental results. These findings are important because they narrow the theoretical space by limiting the role of an important class of explanation-retrieval/integration cost-at least for relative clause processing in Chinese.
Y1  - 2013
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/34666
SN  - 1932-6203
VL  - 8
IS  - 10
PB  - PLoS
CY  - San Fransisco
ER  -