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Effects of Age and Location in Chinese Relative Clauses Processing

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Abstract

Three experiments investigated Chinese relative clause processing with children, youths and elders using sentence-picture matching and self-paced reading methods. In Experiment 1, we found that object-extracted clause were easier to comprehend than subject-extracted clause , and object-modified relative clause (i.e., object-modified subject-extracted clause\(\backslash \)object-modified object-extracted clause) were difficult to comprehend than subject modified relative clause (subject-modified subject-extracted clause\(\backslash \)subject-modified object-extracted clause). Importantly, this paper also found 5–6.5 ages may be critical for children to comprehend RCs in Chinese. Experiment 2 also showed that S-ORCs were easier to comprehend than S-SRCs for youths and elders. Further, elders have more difficulty comprehending RCs than youths. Experiment 3 indicated that there were no significant differences in difficulty between O-SRCs and O-ORCs, and no differences were found between youths and elders. In general, our findings gave support to predictions of working memory-based theory, and also indicated that RCs processing has an intricate course. Many factors such as syntactic, language specificity, experience, personality, must all be considered in sentence processing.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Social Science Fund [13CYY026] to the corresponding author Wenguang He. I also paid my heartfelt gratefulness to Prof. Charles Clifton Jr. from UMassAmherst for his comments about the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Education, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, 273165, China

    Wenguang He & Runqing Ji

  2. Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, 100101, China

    Wenguang He

  3. School of Education, Beijing Sports University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Na Xu

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  1. Wenguang He
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Correspondence to Wenguang He.

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We have informed participants that the aim of the study was only to investigate the inner mechanism of RC processing in Mandarin, and which would not do any harm to them. If they consent to attend the study, they would signature before attending.

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He, W., Xu, N. & Ji, R. Effects of Age and Location in Chinese Relative Clauses Processing. J Psycholinguist Res 46, 1067–1086 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-017-9480-4

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