title: Effects of Age and Location in Chinese Relative Clauses Processing.
abstract: Three experiments investigated Chinese relative clause processing with children, youths and elders using sentence-picture matching and self-paced reading methods. In Experiment 1, we found that object-extracted clause were easier to comprehend than subject-extracted clause , and object-modified relative clause (i.e., object-modified subject-extracted clause[Formula: see text]object-modified object-extracted clause) were difficult to comprehend than subject modified relative clause (subject-modified subject-extracted clause[Formula: see text]subject-modified object-extracted clause). Importantly, this paper also found 5-6.5 ages may be critical for children to comprehend RCs in Chinese. Experiment 2 also showed that S-ORCs were easier to comprehend than S-SRCs for youths and elders. Further, elders have more difficulty comprehending RCs than youths. Experiment 3 indicated that there were no significant differences in difficulty between O-SRCs and O-ORCs, and no differences were found between youths and elders. In general, our findings gave support to predictions of working memory-based theory, and also indicated that RCs processing has an intricate course. Many factors such as syntactic, language specificity, experience, personality, must all be considered in sentence processing.
authors.affiliation: School of Education, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, 273165, China. hewg@psych.ac.cn.|Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, 100101, China. hewg@psych.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Wenguang
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7115-3416
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: School of Education, Beijing Sports University, Beijing, 100084, China.
authors.forename: Na
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: School of Education, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, 273165, China.
authors.forename: Runqing
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Ji
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002681:China; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Age; Chinese; Location of relative clause; Relative clause