Quantifying Structural and Non‐structural Expectations in Relative Clause Processing

Structural Expectations in Chinese Relative Clause Comprehension

Relative clauses (RC) are among the most well-studied constructions in the field of psycholinguistics. A wide variety of work explores a robust processing asymmetry such that subject relatives (SRs) are easier to process than object relatives (ORs). For example, English shows a subject advantage, as demonstrated by a number of studies involving different measures including: self-paced reading (...

Relative Clause Ambiguity Resolution in L1 and L2: Are Processing Strategies Transferred?

This study aims at investigating whether Persian native speakers highly advanced in English as a second language (L2ers) can switch to optimal processing strategies in the languages they know and whether working memory capacity (WMC) plays a role in this respect. To this end, using a self-paced reading task, we examined the processing strategies 62 Persian speaking proficient L2ers used to read...

Animacy Effects in Chinese Relative Clause Processing

Processing Relative Clause Extractions in Swedish

Relative clauses are considered strong islands for extraction across languages. Swedish comprises a well-known exception, allegedly allowing extraction from relative clauses (RCE), raising the possibility that island constraints may be subject to "deep variation" between languages. One alternative is that such exceptions are only illusory and represent "surface variation" attributable to indepe...

Verb Bias in Mandarin Relative Clause Processing

Recent research has indicated that a verb’s preferential subcategorization frame plays a fundamental role in guiding the choice of the type of complement that follows a verb. For example, sentences with a sentential complement-biased verb, such as “admitted”, will cause less processing difficulties when it is followed by a sentential complement than when it is followed by a direct object. Such ...