The processing of relative clauses receives much concern from linguists. The finding that object relatives are easier to process than subiect relatives in Chinese challenges the notion that subject relative clauses ar...The processing of relative clauses receives much concern from linguists. The finding that object relatives are easier to process than subiect relatives in Chinese challenges the notion that subject relative clauses are preferred universally. A large body of literature provides theories related to sentence processing mechanisms for native speakers but leaves one area relatively untouched： how bilinguals process sentences. This study is designed to examine the case where the individuals with a Chinese L1 language background process subject-extracted subject relative clauses （SS） and subject-extracted object relative clauses （SO） by using event- related potentials （ERPs） to probe into the real-time language processing and presents a direct manifestation of brain activity. The findings from this study support the subject relative clause preference due to the strong influence of English relative clause markedness and bilinguals＇ relative lower working memory capacity.展开更多
基金This work was supported through the National Social Science Foundation of China （13BYY072）.
文摘The processing of relative clauses receives much concern from linguists. The finding that object relatives are easier to process than subiect relatives in Chinese challenges the notion that subject relative clauses are preferred universally. A large body of literature provides theories related to sentence processing mechanisms for native speakers but leaves one area relatively untouched： how bilinguals process sentences. This study is designed to examine the case where the individuals with a Chinese L1 language background process subject-extracted subject relative clauses （SS） and subject-extracted object relative clauses （SO） by using event- related potentials （ERPs） to probe into the real-time language processing and presents a direct manifestation of brain activity. The findings from this study support the subject relative clause preference due to the strong influence of English relative clause markedness and bilinguals＇ relative lower working memory capacity.
