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

Chapter 2 Issues in Relative Clause Processing
(14) a. Mandarin SRC with demonstrative:
[Zheige [ei yaoqing fuhao dei] guanyuani] xinhuaibugui.
This-CL invite tycoon gen official have bad intentions
’The official who invited the tycoon has bad intentions.’
b. Passivized Mandarin ORC:
[Bei fuhao yaoqing ei dei] guanyuani xinhuaibugui.
bei tycoon invite gen official have bad intentions
’The official who the tycoon invited has bad intentions.’
If the Gap Assumption is correct and the reader is aware of the gap in the SRC, no
difference in reading time is predicted between the demonstrative condition and the one
without zheige. As for the ORC, inserting the passivization marker should increase the
difficulty in the RC region in case the Storage Cost predictions are correct. The reason
is that more syntactic heads would be stored in memory when an RC is predicted and
not a main clause as assumed by Hsiao and Gibson. In short, under Hsiao and Gibson’s
assumptions the zheige condition should have no effect, whereas the bei condition would
increase the difficulty on the ORC. The results showed an overall subject preference
in the total reading times. The preference was mainly found on the relativizer and
the head noun (de N2). No effect was found on the RC region before the relativizer.
This is consistent with Lin and Bever (2006a). On the relativizer (and on the preceding
region, but not significantly) the SRC condition without the determiner (SR-no-det) was
easier than the condition with the determiner (SR-det). This is not consistent with the
Gap Assumption but with the Elided Subject Assumption. The Storage Cost hypothesis
under the Elided Subject Assumption would predict less syntactic heads in the SR-no-det
condition, since not an RC but a main clause is expected. This confirms the prediction
of the corpus frequency data. The initial misinterpretation in the SR-no-det condition
receives support by another finding: On the regions following the head noun an increased
difficulty was observed in the SR-no-det condition. This could be caused by a reanalysis
due to the misinterpretation as a main clause. A difference between the OR-bei and
OR-no-bei conditions was only observed on the relativizer. In particular, the no-bei
condition was harder. This points to a reanalysis process due to initially misinterpreting
the ORC as main clause. In spite of that, no effects pointing to a misanalysis were
observed in the pre-relativizer region.
To summarize, the ORC data of Kuo and Vasishth’s study do not support the Storage
Cost Account, since being aware of an ORC following did not increase difficulty in
the RC region. However, evidence for an initial misinterpretation was found in the
reanalysis effect on the relativizer. SRC data supports a Storage Cost Account only
under the Elided Subject Assumption, meaning that readers interpret SRCs initially as
main clauses with an elided subject. Altogether a subject preference effect was shown
which was located on the relativizer and head noun region like in Lin and Bever (2006a).
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