Connectionist Modeling of Experience-based Effects in Sentence ...

2.2 Chinese Relative Clauses
also semantic information plays an important role in the subject/object difference. For
example, experiments by Traxler et al. (2002) showed that animacy and verb-induced
plausibility are crucial predictors for difficulty differences between both constructions.
Although the global subject preference proves to be resistant, there is at least one
exception reported so far: Chinese Mandarin, where RCs precede the head noun, just
like in Japanese and Korean. Hsiao and Gibson (2003) found in an SPR experiment that
in Mandarin subject relatives are in fact harder to comprehend than object relatives.
Interestingly, henceforward the literature about Chinese relative clauses reports mixed
results. While Lin and Garnsey (2007) and Qiao and Forster (2008) confirmed Hsiao and
Gibson’s results, Kuo and Vasishth (2007) and Lin and Bever (2006b) found a subject
preference. The apparently unsolved question about Chinese Mandarin might tip the
scales in the search of a globally consistent theory of relative clause comprehension.
Theories like Gibson’s (Gibson, 1998) Dependency Locality Theory, which favors an ORadvantage
for Mandarin, or the Accessibility Hypothesis (Keenan and Comrie, 1977; Lin
et al., 2005), which favors a global subject preference, might rise and fall as candidates
for a theory globally consistent across languages. For other theories that are based on
canonicity or word order frequency to make reasonable predictions further investigations
of the Mandarin relative clause structure are necessary.
The following section will discuss the structure of Mandarin RCs. Then relevant
theories are assessed on their predictions concerning English and Mandarin. In the
following, recent studies about the Chinese SRC/ORC difference will be discussed and
their results will be compared to the predictions of the outlined theories. Finally I will
turn to the second topic: language-specific forgetting effects in center-embedding.
2.2 Chinese Relative Clauses
Relative clauses in Chinese Mandarin are head final, i.e., they precede the modified
noun. The RC is attached to the noun with the intervening genitive marker de (gen),
which here serves as a relativizer.
(9) a. Mandarin SRC:
[ei yaoqing fuhao dei] guanyuani xinhuaibugui.
invite tycoon gen official have bad intentions
V O S
’The official who invited the tycoon has bad intentions.’
b. Mandarin ORC:
[fuhao yaoqing ei dei] guanyuani xinhuaibugui.
tycoon invite gen official have bad intentions
S V O
’The official who the tycoon invited has bad intentions.’
Subject extracted RCs (example 9a) start with the embedded verb, before which a
subject gap is assumed that has to be filled with the head noun. The SRC’s surface
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