Congratulations Kate!

The paper is based on Chris’ Qualifying Research Paper.

Title and Abstract

Chinese Sentence Comprehension:  Recent Findings

Over the last several years, my colleagues and I have been investigating
syntactic processing in Chinese using self-paced reading, eye-tracking,
and ERP paradigms. I review our recent results in three domains: (i)
What cues guide incremental interpretation in the face is syntactic
ambiguity? (ii) To what extent are syntactic alternatives maintained in
parallel? (iii) Must semantic interpretations always be licensed by
grammatical structure?  I also compare our Chinese findings with results
from similar experiments done in English and other Indo-European
languages, with an interest in understanding what aspects of sentence
comprehension are universal and what aspects might be tuned by
language-specific properties.

Abstract
Within both psycholinguistic theories of parsing and formal theories of syntax, a distinction between arguments and adjuncts is central to some theories, while minimized or denied by others. Even for theories that deem the argument/adjunct distinction important, the exact nature of the distinction has been difficult
to characterize. In this article, we review the psycholinguistic evidence for an argument/adjunct distinction, discuss how argument status can best be defined in the light of such evidence, and consider the implications for how grammatical knowledge is represented and accessed in the human mind.

Abstract
Using the stop-making-sense paradigm (Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlsen, 1995) and eye-tracking during reading, we examined the processing of the Chinese Verb NP1 de NP2 construction, which is temporarily ambiguous between a complement clause (CC) analysis and a relative clause (RC) analysis. Resolving the ambiguity as the more complex, less preferred CC was costly under some conditions but not under others. We took this as evidence for a limited parallel processor, such as Tabor and Hutchins’ (2004) SOPARSE, that maintains multiple syntactic analyses across several words of a sentence when the structures are each supported by the available constraints.

Abstract:

Using the self-paced stop-making-sense paradigm (Boland et al., 1995), we examined the processing of the Chinese ‘Verb NP1 de NP2’ construction, which is temporarily ambiguous between a narrative-object structure (NOS) and a modifier-noun structure (MNS). Two experiments showed that resolving the ambiguity as the more complex, less preferred NOS was cost-free. We took this as evidence for a limited parallel processor that maintains multiple syntactic analyses throughout the ambiguous region of a sentence, when two structures are both supported by the available constraints. In addition, the data patterns replicated an important finding by Zhang et al. (2000), demonstrating that Chinese parsing is multi-constraint based and incremental.