TY  - JOUR
A1  - Wu, Fuyun
A1  - Kaiser, Elsi
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Effects of early cues on the processing of chinese relative clauses
BT  - evidence for experience-based theories
JF  - Cognitive science : a multidisciplinary journal of anthropology, artificial intelligence, education, linguistics, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology ; journal of the Cognitive Science Society
N2  - We used Chinese prenominal relative clauses (RCs) to test the predictions of two competing accounts of sentence comprehension difficulty: the experience-based account of Levy () and the Dependency Locality Theory (DLT; Gibson, ). Given that in Chinese RCs, a classifier and/or a passive marker BEI can be added to the sentence-initial position, we manipulated the presence/absence of classifiers and the presence/absence of BEI, such that BEI sentences were passivized subject-extracted RCs, and no-BEI sentences were standard object-extracted RCs. We conducted two self-paced reading experiments, using the same critical stimuli but somewhat different filler items. Reading time patterns from both experiments showed facilitative effects of BEI within and beyond RC regions, and delayed facilitative effects of classifiers, suggesting that cues that occur before a clear signal of an upcoming RC can help Chinese comprehenders to anticipate RC structures. The data patterns are not predicted by the DLT, but they are consistent with the predictions of experience-based theories.
KW  - Storage cost
KW  - Experience
KW  - Relative clause
KW  - Chinese
KW  - Classifiers
KW  - BEI
Y1  - 2017
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12551
SN  - 0364-0213
SN  - 1551-6709
VL  - 42
SP  - 1101
EP  - 1133
PB  - Wiley
CY  - Hoboken
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Jäger, Lena Ann
A1  - Chen, Zhong
A1  - Li, Qiang
A1  - Lin, Chien-Jer Charles
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - The subject-relative advantage in Chinese: Evidence for expectation-based processing
JF  - Journal of memory and language
N2  - 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.
KW  - Sentence processing
KW  - Relative clause
KW  - Structural expectation
KW  - Working-memory
KW  - Surprisal
KW  - Chinese
Y1  - 2015
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2014.10.005
SN  - 0749-596X
SN  - 1096-0821
VL  - 79
SP  - 97
EP  - 120
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - San Diego
ER  - 
TY  - BOOK
A1  - Hole, Daniel
ED  - Ishihara, Shinichiro
ED  - Petrova, Svetlana
ED  - Schwarz, Anne
T1  - EVEN, ALSO and ONLY in Vietnamese
N2  - The article analyzes the system of focus-sensitive particles and, to a lesser extent, clefts in Vietnamese. EVEN/ALSO/ONLY foci are discussed across syntactic categories, and Vietnamese is found to organize its system of focus-sensitive particles along three dimensions of classification: (i) EVEN vs. ALSO vs. ONLY; (ii) particles c-commanding foci vs. particles c-commanding backgrounds; (iii) adverbial focus-sensitive particles vs. particles c-commanding argument foci only. Towards the end of the paper, free-choice constructions and additional sentence-final particles conveying ONLY and ALSO semantics are briefly discussed. The peculiar Vietnamese system reflects core properties of the analogous empirical domain in Chinese, a known source of borrowings into Vietnamese over the millennia.
T3  - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 - 11 
KW  - focus particles
KW  - background particles
KW  - clefts
KW  - free-choice
KW  - Vietnamese
KW  - Chinese
Y1  - 2008
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-22171
SN  - 1866-4725
ER  -