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 information that verbs carry, a.k.a. verb bias effect, has been shown to influence the processing of languages in head-initial languages such as English. Up to date, no studies have been found to investigate verb bias effect in head-final Mandarin relative clauses. The present paper thus aims to investigate the influence of verb bias during online Mandarin relative clause processing. In addition, the present study also aims to further examine two language processing models, constraint-based model and garden-path model, to see which may be more correct in predicting the processing results. Findings of the present study show that, similar to English speakers, Mandarin speakers are also capable of using the information embedded in the verb to disambiguate and predict sentence structures, thus supporting the predictions of the constraint-based model.