Chinese subject-relative clauses are more difficult to process than the object-relative clauses.
This paper presents an experiment that compared high and low working memory span readers' abilities to process Chinese subject-relative and object-relative clause structures in a self-paced reading paradigm. Comprehension performance results indicated that the object-relative structure was easier to understand than the subject-relative structure. Reading time results showed that participants with low working memory span read the subject-relative structures more slowly than the object-relative structures, but there was no reading time difference for the high working memory span participants. The experiment provides further evidence that the Chinese subject-relative clause structure is more difficult to process than the Chinese object-relative clause structure, especially for low working memory span individuals. Furthermore, these results support a syntactic storage account of the observed complexity difference.
Beijing Key Lab of Applied Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China. Chenbg@bnu.edu.cn
Baoguo
B
Chen
Aihua
A
Ning
Hongyan
H
Bi
Susan
S
Dunlap
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D002681:China; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics