The Processing of <i>Dui</i>-construction in Chinese
- 1
Abstract
In the present study, I examined the Dui-construction from a psycholinguistic perspective. Two experiments on the processing of <i>Dui</i>-constructions have been carried out to reexamine the findings of previous experiments on empty subjects in English and Japanese. There are two advantages of using the Chinese <i>Dui</i>-construction over English and Japanese. Firstly, Chinese is similar to English in that the verb is located before the empty subject of an infinitival clause. It is therefore possible to verify whether the verb control information is delayed or not in this case. Secondly, Chinese is similar to Japanese in that they both allow scrambling of arguments. As such, I can examine whether the recency hypothesis applies to Chinese or not. The results indicated that 1) The control information of the verb is accessed immediately; 2) The recency hypothesis is not supported in the processing of <i>Dui</i>i-constructions. In other words, there exists a language-specific processing system independent of the general recency strategy.
- Aoshima, Sachiko, Colin Phillips & Amy S. Weinberg (2004) Processing filler-gap dependencies in a head-final language. Journal of memory and language, 51, 23-54. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2004.03.001
- Betancort, M., Enrique, M., & Carreiras, M. (2005) The empty PRO: Processing what cannot be seen. In: M. Carreiras and C. Clifton Jr. (Eds.) The on-line study of sentence comprehension: Eyetracking, ERPS and Beyond (pp. 95-118). New York, NY: Psychology Press.
- Chomsky, N. (1981) Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Foris.
- Demestre, J., Meltzer, S., García, Albea, & A. Vigil (1999) Identifying the null subject: Evidence from event-related brain potential. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 28, 293-312. doi:10.1023/A:1023258215604
- Ford, M., Bresnan, J., & Kaplan, R. (1982) A competence-based theory of syntactic closure. In J. Bresnan (Ed.), The mental representation of grammatical relations (pp. 727-796). Cambrige, MA: MIT Press.
- Frazier, L., Clifton, C., & Randall, J. (1983). Filling gaps: Decision principles and structure in sentence comprehension. Cognition, 13, 187-222. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(83)90022-7
- Hwang, J. L. (1998). A comparative study on the grammaticalization of saying verbs in Chinese. NACCL, 10, 585-597.
- Inoue, A., & Fodor, J. D. (1995) Information-paced parsing of Japanese. In: R. Mazuka and N. Nagai (Eds.), Japanese sentence processing, (pp. 9-63). Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
- Kamide, Y., & Mitchell, D. C. (1999) Incremental pre-head attachment in Japanese parsing. Language and cognitive processes, 14, 631-662. doi:10.1080/016909699386211
- MacDonald, M. C., Pearlmutter, N. J., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1994) The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676-703. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.101.4.676
- Miyamoto, E. T. (2002) Case markers as clause boundary inducers in Japanese. Journal of psycholinguistic research, 31, 307-347. doi:10.1023/A:1019540324040
- Ninose, Y., Oda, J., Sakaki, Y., Sakamoto, T., & Gyoba, J. (1998) Ryooji-bunnri-choohoo niyoru kuushugo hantei purosesu-no bunseki (2): Gojun-No kooka (On the real-time processing of empty subjects in Japanese using a dichotic-listening method (2): The word order effect). Ninchi Kagaku (Cognitive Science), 5, 82-88.
- Oda, J., Ninose, Y., Sakaki, Y., Gyoba, J., & Sakamoto, T. (1997) Ryooji-bunnri-choohoo niyoru kuushugo hantei purosesu-no bunseki (On the real-time processing of empty subjects in Japanese using a dichotic-listening method). Ninchi Kagaku (Cognitive Science), 4, 58-63.