Relative clause comprehension revisited: commentary on Eisenberg (2002)

Structural Expectations in Chinese Relative Clause Comprehension

Relative clauses (RC) are among the most well-studied constructions in the field of psycholinguistics. A wide variety of work explores a robust processing asymmetry such that subject relatives (SRs) are easier to process than object relatives (ORs). For example, English shows a subject advantage, as demonstrated by a number of studies involving different measures including: self-paced reading (...

Structuring Expectation: Licensing Animacy in Relative Clause Comprehension

Broadly speaking, subject relative clauses are easier to understand than object relative clauses (Wanner & Maratsos, 1978, Ford, 1983, Holmes & O'Regan, 1981, among many others). This can be demonstrated by a variety of methods that measure the speed and accuracy with which sentences containing relative clauses are processed. As an example, compare (1a), which contains a subject relative clause...

Experience and sentence processing: statistical learning and relative clause comprehension.

Many explanations of the difficulties associated with interpreting object relative clauses appeal to the demands that object relatives make on working memory. MacDonald and Christiansen [MacDonald, M. C., & Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working memory: Comment on Just and Carpenter (1992) and Waters and Caplan (1996). Psychological Review, 109, 35-54] pointed to variations in reading ...

Production predicts comprehension: Animacy effects in Mandarin relative clause processing

Relative clause attachment ambiguity resolution in Persian

The present study seeks to find the way Persian native speakers resolve relative clause attachment ambiguities in sentences containing a complex NP of the type NP of NP followed by a relative clause (RC). Previous off-line studies have found a preference for high attachment in the present study, an on-line technique was used to help identify the nature of this process. Persian speakers were pre...