Animacy effects in Chinese relative clause processing

Abstract

Prior research on relative clauses (RCs) in Mandarin Chinese has led to conflicting results regarding ease of processing subject-extracted RCs (SRCs) versus object-extracted RCs (ORCs) and has often used animacy configurations that are rare in corpora. Building on animacy patterns observed in a corpus, we used self-paced reading to explore how animacy influences real-time processing of Chinese RCs. Experiment 1 tested SRCs, and found marginal facilitation effects with animate heads (subjects) and inanimate objects. Experiment 2 tested ORCs and found significant facilitation effects with inanimate head (objects). Experiment 3 showed that when the subject is animate and the object inanimate, ORCs are as easy to process as SRCs, but when the subject is inanimate and the object is animate, SRCs are processed faster. Thus, the animacy of the head and the embedded noun must be taken into account when evaluating processing ease.

Keywords:

• Animacy
• Relative clause (RC)
• Mandarin Chinese
• Processing

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank audiences at the 14th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), the 2008 Western Conference on Linguistics (WECOL) and the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA), where earlier versions of some of this research were presented. Preliminary analyses of some of the data reported here appeared in Wu, Kaiser, and Andersen (2010). The stimuli used in this research are a revised version of the stimuli used in Wu (2009). We thank Yanan Sheng for assistance in the stimulus revision and running of participants, Xiaomei Qiao, and Tangfeng Yang for assistance in carrying out norming studies, Mei Li for providing facilities in running Experiment 3 at Tongji University, and Rudolf Troike for help with finalising the translations of our Chinese stimuli. This research was partially supported by a project sponsored by the Scientific Research Foundation for Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry, and by a grant from the Shanghai Municipal Philosophy and Social Sciences Foundation (2010BYY003) to the first author.

Notes

¹As a reviewer pointed out, the relation between head animacy and RC-type is clear with object RCs (which tend to occur with inanimate heads), but less so with subject RCs. Indeed, in Mak et al.'s (2002, pp. 54–55) German corpus, the 144 subject-extracted RCs have inanimate heads almost as frequently as animate heads: 57% animate heads and 43% inanimate heads. Also, in Roland et al.'s (2007, p. 357) analysis of the English-language Brown corpus, 47% of 100 randomly-selected subject-extracted RCs have inanimate heads. However, existing corpus data from Chinese suggest that subject RCs’ head animacy patterns (at least in Chinese) may vary depending on the grammatical role of the RC's head noun. For Chinese, Pu (2007, p. 45) and Wu (2009) found that (1) when SRCs modify sentential subjects, animate heads significantly outnumber inanimate heads, but (2) when SRCs modify sentential objects, there is no particular bias toward animate or inanimate heads.

²The term “experiencer” refers to a change of psychological state on a human participant caused by someone or something in the context of certain intransitive verbs (e.g., win, die); experience-theme verbs (e.g., love, discover, like); or causer-experiencer verbs (e.g., please, amuse, amaze, and annoy).

³Lin and Garnsey (2010) manipulated animacy in their stimuli, but they also topicalised their RCs to a sentence-initial position and used null head nouns. Headless RCs and topicalisation in Mandarin normally occur only when supportive discourse contexts are given, but their stimuli were presented in isolation. Thus their stimuli had a marked structure, which may have complicated their results.

⁴One reviewer pointed out that the percentage of RCs where both nouns have the same animacy is 28% in Mak et al.'s (2002) Dutch corpus and 40% in their German corpus. However, viewed from another perspective, this means that the percentage of RCs with contrastive animacy configuration is 72% in Dutch and 60% in German, a pattern similar to Wu's (2009) corpus analysis. Furthermore, at least in Wu's (2009) analyses of Chinese Treebank Corpus, RCs with matched animacy (double-animates or double-inanimates) occurred significantly less frequently than RCs with nonmatched animacy (p'<.05).

⁵In Experiment 1, the log frequencies for the different verbs and for the embedded nouns were matched. The mean log frequencies for the verbs from the SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 3.14 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 3.32 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si. The frequencies do not differ significantly, F(3, 76) = 0.1069, p=.9558. The mean log frequencies for the verbs from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.46 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 9.04 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si. These frequencies also do not differ significantly, F(3, 78) = 0.6015, p=.616. The mean log frequencies for the embedded nouns from the SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 3.07 for Oi-Sa and Oi-Si, 3.28 for Oa-Sa and Oa-Si. The frequencies do not differ significantly, F(3, 78) = 0.1726, p=.9146. The log frequencies for the embedded nouns from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.38 for Oi-Sa and Oi-Si, 9.36 for Oa-Sa and Oa-Si. The frequencies also do not differ significantly, F(3, 82) = 0.0087, p=.9989. Log frequencies for the head nouns were matched for the 2008 dictionary (means: 8.5 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 9.05 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si). According to this corpus, the frequencies of the different head nouns do not differ significantly, F(3, 72) = 1.7263, p=.1692. However, according to the SUBTLEX-CH corpus, the log frequencies for the head nouns are not matched [means: 4.32 for Oi-Sa and Oa-Sa, 2.88 for Oa-Si and Oi-Si; F(3, 74) = 4.8757, p=.0038]. As said, the frequency check reported above are based on an incomplete list of words that have their frequencies listed in either resource.

⁶At the sentence-initial RC-verb position (pos 1, e.g., raokai “bypass”), there was a marginal main effect of Head Animacy (t=1.84, p=.0663), and a marginal interaction between Head Animacy and Embedded-noun Animacy (t=−1.8, p=.073). However, given that this is the first word region, these weak effects are probably due to lexical differences.

⁷In Experiment 3, the log frequencies were matched for the verbs, but not for the embedded nouns and for the head nouns. The mean log frequencies of the verbs from SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 3.83 for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads, 3.41 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with animate heads. The frequencies do not differ significantly, F(3, 82) = 0.2254, p=.8785. The mean log frequencies of the verb from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.26 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with animate heads, 9.19 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with animate heads. These frequencies also do not differ significantly, F(3, 76) = 0.1274, p=.9436. The log frequencies for the embedded nouns from the SUBTLEX-CH are as follows: 2.86 for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with animate heads, 4.03 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads. The differences in frequencies are marginally significant, F(3, 74) = 2.581, p=.062. The log mean frequencies of the embedded nouns from the 2008 frequency dictionary are as follows: 9.52 for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with animate heads, 9.11 for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads). These frequencies differ significantly, F(3, 76) = 2.833, p=.044. Reversely for the head nouns, their log frequencies for SRCs with inanimate heads and for ORCs with inanimate heads are more frequent than the log frequencies for SRCs with animate heads and for ORCs with animate heads. However, because we used a Latin-square design such that the different nouns rotated through the different conditions, we do not think this affects our results.