Comprehending Chinese Relative Clauses in Context: Thematic Patterns and Grammatical Functions

Processing asymmetries between subjectand object-extracted relative clauses (RCs) have been reported in various languages. This paper examines whether locality or one’s experience of canonical thematic patterns better predicts the processing of head-final RCs by manipulating thematic patterns in the contexts. Two self-paced reading experiments of relative clauses preceded by contexts were conducted. In Experiment 1, two factors were manipulated: the context prior to the RCs consisted of either canonical (Agent-Verb-Patent) or scrambled thematic patterns with BA (Agent-BA-Patient-Verb), and the RCs involved subject or object extractions. It was found that only when preceded by the canonical Agent-Verb-Patent patterns was an ORC advantage obtained. In Experiment 2, we further used passives in the context, forming thematic patterns of Patient-BEI-Agent-Verb. The processing advantage for ORCs was altogether eliminated. We conclude that the processing advantage for Chinese ORCs previously reported was due to thematic priming, not locality. This paper thus shows that in comprehending Chinese relative clauses, the thematic experience in the preceding context is important in determining how easily the relative clause can be comprehended.