An ERP Study of the Object Preference in Processing Chinese Relative Clauses

Through an event-related potential（ERP）study, we examined the processing mechanisms of four types of Chinese（Mandarin） relative clauses（RCs）,namely subject subject-extracted relative clause（SSR）,subject object-extracted relative clause（SOR）, object subject-extracted relative clause（OSR）, and object object-extracted relative clause（OOR） to test the universality and language specificity of RC comprehension processes. The results of this study support a preference for object-extracted RCs modifying both the subject and object of a sentence, i.e.,SORs and OORs. In particular, ERP results showed stronger P600 effects in the RC region for SSRs compared with SORs, which we argue reflects a canonical word order theory. Stronger N400 effects were observed for verbs compared with nouns, reflecting easier understanding for nouns. ERP results from the matrix clause object and the relativizer “de” showed stronger P600 effects in SSRs compared with SORs,suggesting thematic structure effects on syntactic construction and the processing preference of the whole sentence.