Garden Path and the Comprehension of Head-Final Relative Clauses

Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics book series (SITP, volume 38)

Abstract

This chapter explores the issue of garden-path in the comprehension of head-final relative clauses (particularly in Chinese and Japanese). Experimental data from two self-paced reading studies in Chinese are compared, showing the existence of a main-clause garden-path effect on the object-extracted relative clause modifying the object of the matrix clause. Different approaches adopted to indicate an upcoming relative clause (and thus to avoid a potential garden-path effect) are evaluated, including using internal relative-clause markers, classifier-noun mismatches, relativization-inducing contexts and providing specific instructions on the existence and position of relative clauses in the matrix clauses. The garden-path effect associated with a relative clause can be avoided by using a classifier-noun mismatch along with a carefully constructed referential context. Experiments giving specific instructions on the existence of relative clauses can also diminish the garden-path effect.

Keywords

Relative clauses Garden-path Sentence comprehension Head-final structures Context 
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Notes

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to participants at the International Conference on Processing Head-Final Structures at Rochester Institute of Technology, for their comments and discussions and especially to the organizers/editors and reviewers for their valuable suggestions on previous versions of this chapter. We also thank Natalie Hsu for useful discussions. Research hereby presented has been supported by research grants from the National Science Council of Taiwan (NSC 95-2411-H-003-056 & NSC 96-2411-H-003-035). Research assistance from Paul Chang, Li-Hsin Ning and Larry Hong-Lin Li is gratefully acknowledged.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of East Asian Languages and CulturesIndiana UniversityBloomingtonUSA
  2. 2.University of ArizonaTucsonUSA

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