Cheng Tuyuan, Wu Jei-Tun, Huang Shuanfan
General Education Center, National Tainan Junior College of Nursing, Tainan, Taiwan.
Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2018 Oct;47(5):1035-1055. doi: 10.1007/s10936-018-9576-5.
The processing advantage of Subject-gapped relative clause (SRC) versus Object-gapped relative clause (ORC) has been advocated by competing processing accounts. Using a self-paced listening paradigm, this study investigates what Chinese RC online processing asymmetry looks like under concurrent memory load manipulation. Both On-line listening times and Post-online measures of Chinese SRCs and ORCs are estimated and compared. The on-line results show that ORCs and SRCs demonstrate no differential processing patterns under the interfering conditions. At the relativizer-DE marker region, under 0-digt-load, SRCs show processing advantage, while under 5-digit-load condition, SRCs display greater listening times than ORCs. Furthermore, the Post-online RTs and accuracy of post-sentence comprehension and digit recalls show that processing of SRCs had worse performance. These results lead to the conjecture that there may be no intrinsic processing asymmetry in Chinese RCs, and underscore the necessity that future studies in exploring the processing metrics of sentence complexity should consider the working memory involvement.
主语空位关系从句（SRC）与宾语空位关系从句（ORC）的加工优势一直存在不同的加工理论之争。本研究采用自定步速听力范式，探究在同时进行记忆负荷操作的情况下，中文关系从句在线加工不对称的表现形式。研究对中文SRC和ORC的在线听力时间以及在线后测指标进行了估计和比较。在线结果表明，在干扰条件下，ORC和SRC没有表现出不同的加工模式。在关系代词-否定标记区域，在0位数负荷条件下，SRC表现出加工优势，而在5位数负荷条件下，SRC的听力时间比ORC更长。此外，在线后测反应时以及句子后理解和数字回忆的准确率表明，SRC的加工表现更差。这些结果引发了这样的推测：中文关系从句可能不存在内在的加工不对称性，并强调了未来在探索句子复杂性加工指标的研究中考虑工作记忆参与的必要性。
