He Wenguang, Xu Na, Ji Runqing
School of Education, Qufu Normal University, Qufu, 273165, China.
Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, 100101, China.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2017 Oct;46(5):1067-1086. doi: 10.1007/s10936-017-9480-4.
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[Formula: see text]object-modified object-extracted clause) were difficult to comprehend than subject modified relative clause (subject-modified subject-extracted clause[Formula: see text]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.
三项实验运用句子-图片匹配和自定步速阅读方法，对儿童、青年和老年人处理汉语关系从句的情况进行了研究。在实验1中，我们发现宾语提取从句比主语提取从句更容易理解，并且宾语修饰关系从句（即宾语修饰主语提取从句[公式：见文本]宾语修饰宾语提取从句）比主语修饰关系从句（主语修饰主语提取从句[公式：见文本]主语修饰宾语提取从句）更难理解。重要的是，本文还发现5至6.5岁可能是儿童理解汉语关系从句的关键时期。实验2还表明，对于青年人和老年人来说，主语-宾语关系从句比主语-主语关系从句更容易理解。此外，老年人在理解关系从句方面比青年人更困难。实验3表明，宾语-主语关系从句和宾语-宾语关系从句在难度上没有显著差异，青年人和老年人之间也没有差异。总体而言，我们的研究结果支持了基于工作记忆理论的预测，也表明关系从句的处理过程错综复杂。在句子处理中，必须考虑许多因素，如句法、语言特异性、经验、个性等。
