@article{JaegerChenLietal.2015,
  author    = {J{\"a}ger, Lena Ann and Chen, Zhong and Li, Qiang and Lin, Chien-Jer Charles and Vasishth, Shravan},
  title     = {The subject-relative advantage in Chinese: Evidence for expectation-based processing},
  series = {Journal of memory and language},
  volume    = {79},
  journal   = {Journal of memory and language},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
  address   = {San Diego},
  issn      = {0749-596X},
  doi       = {10.1016/j.jml.2014.10.005},
  pages     = {97 -- 120},
  year      = {2015},
  abstract  = {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 position. The evidence from our studies is consistent with the predictions of expectation-based accounts but not with those of memory-based theories. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.},
  language  = {en}
}
@article{VasishthChenLietal.2013,
  author    = {Vasishth, Shravan and Chen, Zhong and Li, Qiang and Guo, Gueilan},
  title     = {Processing chinese relative clauses - evidence for the subject-relative advantage},
  series = {PLoS one},
  volume    = {8},
  journal   = {PLoS one},
  number    = {10},
  publisher = {PLoS},
  address   = {San Fransisco},
  issn      = {1932-6203},
  doi       = {10.1371/journal.pone.0077006},
  pages     = {15},
  year      = {2013},
  abstract  = {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.},
  language  = {en}
}