Uncertainty in processing relative clauses across East Asian languages

The processing difficulty profile for relative clauses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean represents a challenge for theories of human parsing.We address this challenge using a grammar-based complexitymetric, one that reflects aminimalist analysis of relative clauses for all three languages as well as structure-dependent corpus distributions. Together, these define a comprehender’s degree of uncertainty at each point in a sentence. We use this idea to quantify the intuition that people do comprehension work as they incrementally resolve ambiguity, word by word. We find that downward changes to this quantitative measure of uncertainty derive observed processing contrasts between Subjectand Object-extracted relative clauses. This demonstrates that the complexity metric, in conjunction with a minimalist grammar and corpus-based weights, accounts for the widely-observed Subject Advantage. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s10831-014-9126-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. J. Yun Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-4376, USA e-mail: [email protected] Z. Chen Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, USA e-mail: [email protected] T. Hunter Institute of Linguistics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Whitman Department of Linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Hale (B) Department of Linguistics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-4701, USA e-mail: [email protected]