Download PDF

Journal of East Asian Linguistics

, Volume 24, Issue 2, pp 113–148 | Cite as

Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages

  • Jiwon Yun
  • Zhong Chen
  • Tim Hunter
  • John Whitman
  • John Hale
Open Access
Article
First Online:
Received:
Accepted:

Abstract

The processing difficulty profile for relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean represents a challenge for theories of human parsing. We address this challenge using a grammar-based complexity metric, one that reflects a minimalist analysis of relative clauses for all three languages as well as structure-dependent corpus distributions. Together, these define a comprehender’s degree of uncertainty at each point in a sentence. We use this idea to quantify the intuition that people do comprehension work as they incrementally resolve ambiguity, word by word. We find that downward changes to this quantitative measure of uncertainty derive observed processing contrasts between Subject- and Object-extracted relative clauses. This demonstrates that the complexity metric, in conjunction with a minimalist grammar and corpus-based weights, accounts for the widely-observed Subject Advantage.

Keywords

Relative clause Information theory Minimalism Chinese Japanese Korean 
Download to read the full article text

Supplementary material

10831_2014_9126_MOESM1_ESM.tar.gz (10 kb)
ESM 1 (tar.gz 10 kb)

References

  1. Attneave Fred (1959) Applications of Information Theory to Psychology: A summary of basic concepts, methods and results. Oxford: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
  2. Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua, Micha Perles, and Eliyahu Shamir. 1964. On formal properties of simple phrase structure grammars. In Language and Information: Selected Essays on their Theory and Application, Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, Chap 9, 116–150.Google Scholar
  3. Berwick, Robert, and Samuel Epstein. 1995. On the Convergence of ‘Minimalist’ Syntax and Categorial Grammar. In: Algebraic methods in language processing : proceedings of the tenth Twente Workshop on Language Technology joint with first AMAST Workshop on Language Processing. ed. A. Nijholt.Google Scholar
  4. Bever, Thomas. 1970. The cognitive basis for linguistic structures. In Cognition and the development of language, ed. J. Hayes, 279–360. John Wiley.Google Scholar
  5. Blachman Nelson (1968) The amount of information that y gives about X. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory IT 14(1): 27–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. Brame, Michael. 1967. A new analysis of the relative clause: evidence for an interpretive theory. Unpublished manuscript.Google Scholar
  7. Chen Baoguo, Aihua Ning, Hongyan Bi, Susan Dunlap (2008) Chinese subject-relative clauses are more difficult to process than the object-relative clauses. Acta Psychologica 129(1): 61–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  8. Chen Zhong. 2014. Animacy in sentence processing across languages: an information-theoretical perspective. Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University.Google Scholar
  9. Chen, Zhong, Kyle Grove and John Hale. 2012. Structural expectations in Chinese relative clause comprehension. In Proceedings of the 29th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL-29), ed. J. Choi, E. A. Hogue, J. Punske, D. Tat, J. Schertz, and A. Trueman, 29–37, Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
  10. Cherry, Colin. 1961. On human communication: a review, a survey, and a criticism, 2nd edn. New York: Science Ed.Google Scholar
  11. Chomsky, Noam. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistic theory. In The view from building 20: essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger, Current studies in linguistics, Vol 24, 1–52. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
  12. Chomsky Noam (1995) The Minimalist Program. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.Google Scholar
  13. Frank, Stefan. 2013. Uncertainty reduction as a measure of cognitive load in sentence comprehension. Topics in Cognitive Science5(3):475–494. doi:10.1111/tops.12025.
  14. Frauenfelder, Uli, Juan Segui, and Jacques Mehler(1980). Monitoring around the relative clause. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 19:328–337.Google Scholar
  15. Frazier Lyn (1987) Syntactic processing: Evidence from Dutch. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 5(4): 519–559.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. Garner Wendell (1962) Uncertainty and structure as psychological concepts. Wiley, New York.Google Scholar
  17. Gibson, Edward. 2000. Dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Image, Language, brain: Papers from the First Mind Articulation Project Symposium, ed. A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, and W. O’Neil. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.Google Scholar
  18. Gibson, Edward and Hsiao-Hung Iris Wu. 2013. Processing Chinese relative clauses in context. Language and Cognitive Processes 28(1-2):125–155.Google Scholar
  19. Grenander, Ulf. 1967. Syntax-controlled probabilities. Technical Report. Providence, RI: Brown University Division of Applied Mathematics.Google Scholar
  20. Guillaumin, Matthieu. 2005. Conversations between mildly context-sensitive grammars. Internship report, Ecole Normale Superieure and UCLA.Google Scholar
  21. Hale, John. 2001. A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of the 2nd NAACL, Pittsburgh, PA.Google Scholar
  22. Hale John (2003) The information conveyed by words in sentences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 32(2): 101–123.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  23. Hale John (2006) Uncertainty about the rest of the sentence. Cognitive Science 30(4): 643–672.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  24. Han, Chung-hye, Na-Rae Han, Eon-Suk Ko, and Martha Palmer. 2002. Development and Evaluation of a Korean Treebank and its Application to NLP. Language and Information 6(1):123–138.Google Scholar
  25. Han, Chung-hye and Jong-Bok Kim. 2004. Are there “double relative clauses” in Korean? Linguistic Inquiry 35(2):315–337.Google Scholar
  26. Harkema, Henk. 2001. Parsing minimalist grammars. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
  27. Harris Theodore (1963) The Theory of Branching Processes. Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
  28. Hawkins John (2004) Efficiency and Complexity in Grammars. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
  29. Hick William (1952) On the rate of gain of information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 4(1): 11–26.Google Scholar
  30. Hirose, Yuki. 2009. Processing relative clauses in Japanese: coping with multiple ambiguities. In The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics, Vol. II, Chapter 35, 264–269. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
  31. Hoshi, Koji. 1995. Structural and interpretive aspects of head-internal and head-external relative Structural and interpretive aspects of head-internal and head-external relative clauses. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester.Google Scholar
  32. Hsiao, Franny, and Edward Gibson. 2003. Processing relative clauses in Chinese. Cognition 90:3–27.Google Scholar
  33. Hsiao, Yaling, Jinman Li, and Maryellen MacDonald. 2014. Ambiguity affects Mandarin relative clause processing. In The 27th annual CUNY conference on human sentence processing, Columbus, OH. The Ohio State University.Google Scholar
  34. Huang, C.-T. James, Yen-Hui Audrey Li, and Yafei Li. 2009. The Syntax of Chinese. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
  35. Ishii, Yasuo. 1991. Operators and empty categories in Japanese. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut.Google Scholar
  36. Ishizuka, Tomoko. 2005. Processing relative clauses in Japanese. In Papers in Psycholinguistics 2, UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics, ed. R. Okabe and K. Nielsen, Volume 13, 135–157, Los Angeles: UCLA Linguistics Department, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
  37. Ishizuka, Tomoko, Kentaro Nakatani, and Edward Gibson. 2003. Relative clause extraction complexity in Japanese. Poster presented at the 16th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.Google Scholar
  38. Jäger, Lena, Zhong Chen, Qiang Li, Chien-Jer Charles Lin, and Shravan Vasishth. (in press). The subject-relative advantage in Chinese: Evidence for expectation-based processing. Journal of Memory and Language.Google Scholar
  39. Jurafsky Daniel (1996) A probabilistic model of lexical and syntactic access and disambiguation. Cognition 20: 137–194.Google Scholar
  40. Just, Marcel, Patricia Carpenter, Timothy Keller, William Eddy, and Keith Thulborn. 1996. Brain Activation Modulated by Sentence Comprehension. Science 274(5284):114.Google Scholar
  41. Kaplan, Tamar, and John Whitman. 1995. The Category of Relative Clauses in Japanese, with Reference to Korean. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 4(1):29–58.Google Scholar
  42. Kayne, Richard S. 1994. The Antisymmetry of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
  43. Keenan, Edward, and Bernard Comrie. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8(1):63–99.Google Scholar
  44. Keenan, Edward and Sarah Hawkins. 1987. The psychological validity of the Accessibility Hierarchy. In Universal Grammar: 15 Essays, ed. E. Keenan, 60–85. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
  45. King, Jonathan and Marcel Just. 1991. Individual differences in syntactic processing: The role of working memory. Journal of Memory and Language 30(5):580–602.Google Scholar
  46. King, Jonathan and Marta Kutas. 1995. Who did what and when? Using word- and clause-level ERPS to monitor working memory usage in reading. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 7(3):376–395.Google Scholar
  47. Kurohashi, Sadao and Makoto Nagao. 2003. Building a Japanese Parsed Corpus. In Treebanks, Text, Speech and Language Technology, ed. A. Abeillé and N. Ide Vol. 20, 249–260, Springer Netherlands. doi:10.1007/978-94-010-0201-1_14.
  48. Kwon, Nayoung, Yoonhyoung Lee, Peter C. Gordon, Robert Kluender, and Maria Polinsky. 2010. Cognitive and linguistic factors affecting subject/object asymmetry: An eye-tracking study of pre-nominal relative clauses in Korean. Language 86(3):546–582.Google Scholar
  49. Kwon, Nayoung, Maria Polinsky, and Robert Kluender. 2006. Subject Preference in Korean. In ed. D. Baumer, D. Montero, and M. Scanlon, 1-14. Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL-25), Somerville, Mass.: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
  50. Levelt, Willem. 1974. Formal grammars in linguistics and psycholinguistics, Janua linguarum. Series minor. Vol. 192. The Hague: Mouton, Recently reprinted by John Benjamins, isbn 978 90 272 3251 9.Google Scholar
  51. Levy Roger (2008) Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition 106: 1126–1177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  52. Levy, Roger, and Galen Andrew. 2006. Tregex and Tsurgeon: tools for querying and manipulating tree data structures. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 06).Google Scholar
  53. Lewis, Richard L., and Shravan Vasishth. 2005. An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilled memory retrieval. Cognitive Science 29:1–45.Google Scholar
  54. Lin Chien-Jer Charles (2008) The processing foundation of head-final relative clauses. Language and Linguistics 9(4): 813–839.Google Scholar
  55. Lin Chien-Jer Charles (2014) Effect of thematic order on the comprehension of Chinese relative clauses. Lingua 140: 180–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  56. Lin, Chien-Jer Charles. (submitted). Subject prominence and processing dependencies in pronominal relative clauses: The comprehension of possessive relative clauses and adjunct relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese.Google Scholar
  57. Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, and Thomas Bever. 2006. Subject preference in the processing of relative clauses in Chinese. In Proceedings of the 25 \({^{th}}\) WCCFL, 254–260.Google Scholar
  58. Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, and Thomas Bever 2007. Processing doubly-embedded head-final relative clauses. In Interdisciplinary Approaches to Relative Clauses, Cambridge, UK.Google Scholar
  59. Lin, Chien-Jer Charles, and Thomas Bever. 2011. Garden path and the comprehension of head-final relative clauses. In Processing and Producing Head-final Structures, Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, ed. H. Yamashita, Y. Hirose, and J. L. Packard, 277–297. Springer.Google Scholar
  60. Lin, Yowyu Brian, and Susan Garnsey 2011. Animacy and the resolution of temporary ambiguity in relative clause comprehension in Mandarin. In Processing and Producing Head-final Structures, Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, ed. H. Yamashita, Y. Hirose, and J. L. Packard, 241–276. Springer.Google Scholar
  61. MacDonald, Maryellen, and Morten Christiansen. 2002. Reassessing working memory: A reply to Just and Carpenter and Waters and Caplan. Psychological Review 109(1):35–54.Google Scholar
  62. MacWhinney Brian (1977) Starting points. Language 53: 152–168.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  63. MacWhinney, Brian. 1982. Basic syntactic processes. In Language Acquisition, Syntax and Semantics, ed. S. Kuczaj, Vol. 1, Hillsdale, NJ.: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
  64. Mak, Willem M., Wietske Vonk, and Herbert Schriefers. 2002. The Influence of Animacy on Relative Clause Processing. Journal of Memory and Language 47(1):50–68.Google Scholar
  65. Mecklinger, Axel, Herbert Schriefers, Karsten Steinhauer, and Angela Friederici. 1995. Processing relative clauses varying on syntactic and semantic dimensions: An analysis with event-related potentials. Memory and Cognition 23(4):477–94.Google Scholar
  66. Michaelis, Jens. 2001. On formal properties of Minimalist Grammars. Ph. D. thesis, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany.Google Scholar
  67. Mitchell, Don, Fernando Cuetos, Martin Corley, and Marc Brysbaert. 1995. Exposure-based models of human parsing: Evidence for the use of coarse-grained (nonlexical) statistical records. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 24:469–488.Google Scholar
  68. Miyamoto, Edson, and Michiko Nakamura. 2003. Subject/object asymmetries in the processing of relative clauses in Japanese. In The 22nd West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL-22), University of California, San Diego, 342–355.Google Scholar
  69. Miyamoto, Edson, and Michiko Nakamura. 2013. Unmet Expectations in the Comprehension of Relative Clauses in Japanese. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.Google Scholar
  70. Nederhof, Mark-Jan and Giorgio Satta. 2008. Computing partition functions of PCFGs. Research on Language and Computation 6:139–162.Google Scholar
  71. Ning, Chunyan. 1993. The Overt Syntax of Relativization and Topicalization in Chinese. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of California, Irvine.Google Scholar
  72. O’Grady William (1997) Syntactic Development. The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
  73. Packard, Jerome L., Zheng Ye, and Xiaolin Zhou. 2011. Filler-gap processing in Mandarin relative clauses: Evidence from event-related potentials. In Processing and Producing Head-final Structures, Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, ed. H. Yamashita, Y. Hirose, and J. Packard, Vol 38, 219–240. Springer.Google Scholar
  74. Qiao, Xiaomei, Liyao Shen, and Kenneth Forster. 2012. Relative clause processing in Mandarin: Evidence from the maze task. Language and Cognitive Processes 27(4):611–630.Google Scholar
  75. Schachter Paul (1973) Focus and relativization. Language 49: 19–46.Google Scholar
  76. Schriefers, Herbert, Angela Friederici, and Katja Kühn. 1995. The Processing of Locally Ambiguous Relative Clauses in German. Journal of Memory and Language 34:499–520.Google Scholar
  77. Sheldon Amy (1974) On the role of parallel function in the acquisition of relative clauses in English. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 13: 272–281.Google Scholar
  78. Smith, Raoul N. 1973. Probabilistic Performance Models of Language. Mouton.Google Scholar
  79. Stabler, Edward. 1997. Derivational minimalism. In Logical Aspects of Computational Linguistics, ed. C. Retoré, Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
  80. Stromswold, Karin, David Caplan, Nathaniel Alpert, and Scott Rauch. 1996. Localization of syntactic comprehension by positron emission tomography. Brain and Language 52:452–473.Google Scholar
  81. Traxler, Matthew, Robin Morris, and Rachel Seely. 2002. Processing subject and object relative clauses: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language 47:69–90.Google Scholar
  82. Ueno, Mieko and Susan Garnsey. 2008. An ERP study of the processing of subject and object relative clauses in Japanese. Language and Cognitive Processes 23(5):646–688.Google Scholar
  83. Vasishth, Shravan, Zhong Chen, Qiang Li, and Guilan Guo. 2013. Processing Chinese Relative Clauses: Evidence for the Subject-Relative Advantage. PLoS ONE 8(10):e77006.Google Scholar
  84. Vergnaud, Jean-Roger. 1974. French Relative Clauses. Ph. D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
  85. Wanner, E. and M. Maratsos. 1978. An ATN approach in comprehension. In Linguistic theory and psychological reality, 119–161. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
  86. Whitman, John. 2012. The prenominal relative clause problem. In Workshop on Formal Altaic Linguistics (WAFL) 8, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics (MITWPL), ed. U. Özge. Cambridge, Mass.Google Scholar
  87. Wilson, Kellogg and John B. Carroll. 1954. Applications of entropy measures to problems of sequential structure. In Psycholinguistics: a survey of theory and research, ed. C. E. Osgood and T. A. Sebeok, 103–110, Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
  88. Wu, Fuyun. 2009. Factors Affecting Relative Clause Processing in Mandarin: Corpus and Behavioral Evidence. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
  89. Wu, Fuyun and Elsi Kaiser (Submitted). Effects of early cues on the processing of Chinese relative clauses: Evidence for experience-based theories.Google Scholar
  90. Wu, Fuyun, Elsi Kaiser, and Elaine Andersen. 2012. Animacy effects in Chinese relative clause processing. Language and Cognitive Processes 27(10):1489–1524.Google Scholar
  91. Wu, Xiu-Zhi Zoe. 2000. Grammaticalization and the Development of Functional Categories in Mandarin. Ph. D. Dissertation, University of Southern California.Google Scholar
  92. Xue, Nianwen, Fei Xia, Fu-Dong Chiou, and Martha Palmer. 2005. The Penn Chinese TreeBank: Phrase structure annotation of a large corpus. Natural Language Engineering 11(2):207–238, doi:10.1017/S135132490400364X.
  93. Yun, Jiwon, John Whitman, and John Hale. 2010. Subject-object asymmetries in Korean sentence comprehension. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. ed. S. Ohlsson and R. Catrambone.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2015

Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jiwon Yun
    • 1
  • Zhong Chen
    • 2
  • Tim Hunter
    • 3
  • John Whitman
    • 4
  • John Hale
    • 5
  1. 1.Department of LinguisticsStony Brook UniversityStony BrookUSA
  2. 2.Department of Modern Languages and CulturesRochester Institute of TechnologyRochesterUSA
  3. 3.Institute of LinguisticsUniversity of MinnesotaMinneapolisUSA
  4. 4.Department of LinguisticsCornell UniversityIthacaUSA
  5. 5.Department of LinguisticsCornell UniversityIthacaUSA

Personalised recommendations