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Presented By: Weinberg Institute for Cognitive Science

Cognitive Science Seminar Series: "Memory and Expectation in Processing Mandarin Relative Clauses"

Tzu-Yun Tung, U-M Linguistics

Linguistics graduate student Tzu-Yun Tung will present her work on the processing of relative clauses in Mandarin.

Please visit the Seminar Series website for Zoom access information.

Title: Memory and Expectation in Processing Mandarin Relative Clauses

Abstract: The cause(s) of processing cost of different types of relative clauses (RC) have been difficult to pin down due to the opposite direction of processing asymmetry reported in the literature. While an advantage of subject relative clause (SR) has been found in English, both subject and object relative clause (OR) advantage have been documented in Mandarin. The discrepancy may however be due to (1) ambiguities in the experimental stimuli that obscured RC processing with ambiguity resolution, and (2) different word regions of interest.

The current study eliminates the stimuli confound, and unveils the word-by-word processing of Mandarin RCs using electroencephalography (EEG), compared against predictions of expectation-based Surprisal account, as well as memory-based Dependency Locality Theory (DLT). Instead of viewing the critical RC region (relative verb and relative noun) as a whole, we extract results at the relative verb region which is nearest to the co-dependent trace. Since the relative verb is situated later in the sentence in OR compared to SR, an object advantage indexed by the left anterior negativity (LAN) effect surfaces, which aligns with the Surprisal account, as well as the storage metric of DLT. At the head noun region where the filler-gap dependency is completed, a symmetric processing profile emerges, consistent with the Surprisal account. We additionally speculate the retrieval process of the trace with regard to predictions of the Activation and Direct-access model.

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