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Filler-Gap Processing in Mandarin Relative Clauses: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

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Processing and Producing Head-final Structures

Part of the book series: Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics ((SITP,volume 38))

Abstract

This chapter reports the results of an Event-Related Potential (ERP) study of relative clause processing in Mandarin Chinese. The objective of this research is to determine whether electrophysiological evidence of filler-gap integration costs found for other languages would be observed in Mandarin and to determine where in the relative clause filler-gap integration occurs. To pursue these goals, we analyze ERP data obtained from 20 Mandarin speakers as they read sentences containing subject-gap and object-gap relative clauses modifying the subjects and objects of matrix sentences. Our results indicate a larger P600 ERP component for subject-gap than object-gap relative clauses at the point in the clause where the filler is integrated with the antecedent gap. That effect was found on the relative clause marker de for clauses modifying the matrix subject and on the relative clause head for clauses modifying the matrix object. We interpret our results as supporting the hypothesis that the difficulty of integrating verb arguments is reflected in the magnitude of the P600 ERP component and that in Mandarin relative clauses, subject-gap arguments are more difficult to integrate than object-gap arguments. Based on these findings, we argue that in Mandarin, relative clause verb selectional restrictions may be satisfied in real time either by the relative clause head or by the relative clause marker de, depending on where the relative clause is located within the matrix sentence.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The context affecting an incoming word’s interpretation can include other knowledge such as discourse pragmatic information (e.g., Tanenhaus, Carlson & Trueswell, 1989) in addition to the lexico-semantic and syntactic contextual information that we will focus on here.

  2. 2.

    Several proposals have been offered to account for processing difficulty in object-gap relatives, including accessibility of the relativized NP (Keenan & Comrie, 1977), differences in perspective between the relative clause and matrix sentence (MacWhinney, 1982; MacWhinney & Pleh, 1988), canonical vs. non-canonical word order in the relative clause (MacDonald & Christiansen, 2002), preference for the role of agent to be expressed by the clause-initial NP (Diessel & Thomasello, 2005) and distance between filler and gap, either in linear terms, measured by the number of words or constituents that intervene between the filler and the gap (King & Just, 1991; Kluender & Kutas, 1993; Gibson, 1998; Hsiao & Gibson, 2003), or in structural terms, measured by differences between subject-gap and object-gap relatives in the depth of embedding of the filler versus the gap (Lin and Bever, 2006; O’Grady, Lee, & Choo, 2003).

  3. 3.

    King and Kutas did directly compare the ERP profiles of the relative clause verbs in subject-gap and object-gap clauses but the area they examined was the 200–500 ms interval post-verb-onset, which is earlier than would have been necessary to observe a P600 effect.

  4. 4.

    See also the corpus study by Wu, Kaiser and Andersen, this volume, who found subject-gap relatives to be more frequent, thus potentially easier to process, than object-gap relatives.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Xiaoming Jiang and Longjun Yu for help in running subjects, Gary Huang for help in Presentation programming, Hengqing Chu for help in locating subjects and Susan Garnsey, Gary Dell, Kara Federmeier, Kay Bock and Kiel Christiansen for helpful feedback and advice. We especially thank James Yoon for his input on c-selectional and s-selectional restrictions. Our appreciation also goes to the Research Board at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for funding this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of East Asian Languages and Culture, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 707 S. Mathews, 61801, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

    Jerome L. Packard

  2. Peking University, Beijing, China

    Zheng Ye & Xiaolin Zhou

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  1. Jerome L. Packard
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Correspondence to Jerome L. Packard .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Department of Modern Languages & Culture, Rochester Institute of Technology, 92 Lomb Memorial Drive, Rochester, 14623, New York, USA

    Hiroko Yamashita

  2. Department of Language & Information Sci, The University of Tokyo, 3-8-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, 153-8902, Japan

    Yuki Hirose

  3. , Department of East Languages & Cultures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champai, 707 S. Mathews, Urbana, 61801, Illinois, USA

    Jerome L. Packard

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Packard, J.L., Ye, Z., Zhou, X. (2010). Filler-Gap Processing in Mandarin Relative Clauses: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials. In: Yamashita, H., Hirose, Y., Packard, J. (eds) Processing and Producing Head-final Structures. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 38. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9213-7_11

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