Publications-Books & Chapters in Books

Article View/Open

Publication Export

Google ScholarTM

NCCU Library

Citation Infomation

Related Publications in TAIR

題名 Animacy and the resolution of temporary ambiguity in relative clause comprehension in Mandarin
作者 林祐瑜
Lin, Yowyu
Garnsey, Susan
貢獻者 英文系
關鍵詞 Animacy ; Chinese ; Relative clause ; Structural ambiguity ; Sentence comprehension
日期 2011
上傳時間 27-Mar-2018 16:45:56 (UTC+8)
摘要 Relative clause comprehension requires figuring out the role of the head noun in the relative clause. English speakers find it easier to understand relative clauses in which the head noun plays the subject role (e.g., The official who interrogated the councilman…) than those in which the head noun plays the object role (e.g., The official who the councilman interrogated…). A number of explanations have been proposed, some of which predict that the same asymmetry should hold in all languages and others of which predict that the direction of the asymmetry should vary across languages, depending on language properties. Mandarin Chinese provides an opportunity to pit different explanations against one another because it has head-final relative clauses, which helps deconfound some of the proposed explanations, but previous studies of Mandarin have produced rather mixed results. In two reading time studies in Mandarin, we find that 1) object relatives are easier to understand than subject relatives, which is the opposite pattern for English and supports the accounts that predict cross-linguistic differences, 2) it is easier to understand a relative clause whose head noun is omitted, as is allowed in Mandarin, if the sentence contains animacy cues that help disambiguate the sentences and 3) a semantic feature such as animacy contributes to similarity-based interference during sentence comprehension.
關聯 Springer
Processing and producing head-final structures, Chapter 12, pp 241-275
資料類型 book/chapter
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9213-7_12
dc.contributor 英文系zh_Tw
dc.creator (作者) 林祐瑜zh_TW
dc.creator (作者) Lin, Yowyuen_US
dc.creator (作者) Garnsey, Susanen_US
dc.date (日期) 2011
dc.date.accessioned 27-Mar-2018 16:45:56 (UTC+8)-
dc.date.available 27-Mar-2018 16:45:56 (UTC+8)-
dc.date.issued (上傳時間) 27-Mar-2018 16:45:56 (UTC+8)-
dc.identifier.uri (URI) http://nccur.lib.nccu.edu.tw/handle/140.119/116576-
dc.description.abstract (摘要) Relative clause comprehension requires figuring out the role of the head noun in the relative clause. English speakers find it easier to understand relative clauses in which the head noun plays the subject role (e.g., The official who interrogated the councilman…) than those in which the head noun plays the object role (e.g., The official who the councilman interrogated…). A number of explanations have been proposed, some of which predict that the same asymmetry should hold in all languages and others of which predict that the direction of the asymmetry should vary across languages, depending on language properties. Mandarin Chinese provides an opportunity to pit different explanations against one another because it has head-final relative clauses, which helps deconfound some of the proposed explanations, but previous studies of Mandarin have produced rather mixed results. In two reading time studies in Mandarin, we find that 1) object relatives are easier to understand than subject relatives, which is the opposite pattern for English and supports the accounts that predict cross-linguistic differences, 2) it is easier to understand a relative clause whose head noun is omitted, as is allowed in Mandarin, if the sentence contains animacy cues that help disambiguate the sentences and 3) a semantic feature such as animacy contributes to similarity-based interference during sentence comprehension.en_US
dc.format.extent 544926 bytes-
dc.format.mimetype application/pdf-
dc.relation (關聯) Springer
dc.relation (關聯) Processing and producing head-final structures, Chapter 12, pp 241-275
dc.subject (關鍵詞) Animacy ; Chinese ; Relative clause ; Structural ambiguity ; Sentence comprehensionen_US
dc.title (題名) Animacy and the resolution of temporary ambiguity in relative clause comprehension in Mandarinen_US
dc.type (資料類型) book/chapter
dc.identifier.doi (DOI) 10.1007/978-90-481-9213-7_12
dc.doi.uri (DOI) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9213-7_12