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A study on the processing of ambiguous phrases in Chinese
... Besides, it has been reported that for the Chinese SRC construction ('Verb + NP1 + de + NP2′), there is a temporary ambiguity between a complement clause (CC) analysis and a head-final RC analysis (see the details from Hsieh, Boland, Zhang, and Yan (2009) and Zhang, Zhang, and Hua (2000)). On the other hand, the involvement of the LIFG and the LMTG (i.e., left middle temporal gyrus), which are much overlapped with the brain areas identified in the present study, have been frequently observed in research of ambiguity resolution (e.g., Acheson & Hagoort, 2013;Mason, Just, Keller, & Carpenter, 2003;Rodd, Longe, Randall, & Tyler, 2010;Zempeni, Renken, Hoeks, Hoogduin, & Stowe, 2007). ...
... First, it has been found that there is a strong tendency to initially interpret the Chinese 'verb + NP1 + de + NP2′ construction toward an RC instead of a CC structure (e.g., Hsieh et al., 2009;Lin & Garnsey, 2011;Pu, 2007;Zhang et al., 2000). It is also demonstrated that resolving ambiguity for the 'verb + NP1 + de + NP2′ construction was costly only when the disambiguation was toward the more complex, less preferred CC structure, rather than toward the more preferred RC structure (e.g., Hsieh et al., 2009;Zhang et al., 2000). ...
... First, it has been found that there is a strong tendency to initially interpret the Chinese 'verb + NP1 + de + NP2′ construction toward an RC instead of a CC structure (e.g., Hsieh et al., 2009;Lin & Garnsey, 2011;Pu, 2007;Zhang et al., 2000). It is also demonstrated that resolving ambiguity for the 'verb + NP1 + de + NP2′ construction was costly only when the disambiguation was toward the more complex, less preferred CC structure, rather than toward the more preferred RC structure (e.g., Hsieh et al., 2009;Zhang et al., 2000). With the eyetracking technique, Hsieh et al. (2009) investigated the temporal ambiguity of 'verb + NP1 + de + NP2′ construction and found that when NP1 and NP2 were both animate, the reader tended to initially interpret the sentence as the RC structure. ...
Previous studies investigating the processing of complex sentences have demonstrated the involvement of the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and left superior temporal gyrus (LSTG), which might subserve ordering and storage of linguistic components, respectively, for sentence comprehension. However, how these brain regions are interconnected, especially during the processing of Chinese sentences, need to be further explored. In this study, the neural network supporting the comprehension of Chinese relative clause was identified. Both the LIFG and LSTG exhibited higher activation in processing subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) than object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs). Moreover, a Granger causality analysis revealed that the effective connectivity from the LIFG to LSTG was significant only when participants read Chinese SRCs, which were argued to be more difficult than ORCs. Contrary to the observations of an SRC advantage in most other languages, the present results provide clear neuroimaging evidence for an ORC advantage in Chinese.
... In addition, although this construction allows for two analyses, the relative frequency of the two analyses differs. In the context of V NP1 de NP2, over 700 out of 1000 items randomly selected from a corpus 2 were used as NP (Zhang et al., 2000). ...
... The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate whether online processing of the ambiguous construction V NP1 de NP2 could be affected by the prior presentation of a single prime sentence, and more crucially, whether the strength of structural priming could be modulated by the baseline frequency of alternative structures. In the present study, frequency-based syntactic preference for the construction V NP1 de NP2 was determined on the basis of corpus data and sentence-fragment completion data reported in previous research (e.g., Zhang et al., 2000;Hsieh et al., 2009). According to a corpus analysis, the ratio of NP to VP stands at 7:3 (Zhang et al., 2000. ...
... In the present study, frequency-based syntactic preference for the construction V NP1 de NP2 was determined on the basis of corpus data and sentence-fragment completion data reported in previous research (e.g., Zhang et al., 2000;Hsieh et al., 2009). According to a corpus analysis, the ratio of NP to VP stands at 7:3 (Zhang et al., 2000. See Note 1). ...
Previous research in several European languages has shown that the language processing system is sensitive to both structural frequency and structural priming effects. However, it is currently not clear whether these two types of effects interact during online sentence comprehension, especially for languages that do not have morphological markings. To explore this issue, the present study investigated the possible interplay between structural priming and frequency effects for sentences containing the Chinese ambiguous construction V NP1 de NP2 in a self-paced reading experiment. The sentences were disambiguated to either the more frequent/preferred NP structure or the less frequent VP structure. Each target sentence was preceded by a prime sentence of three possible types: NP primes, VP primes, and neutral primes. When the ambiguous construction V NP1 de NP2 was disambiguated to the dispreferred VP structure, participants experienced more processing difficulty following an NP prime relative to following a VP prime or a neutral baseline. When the ambiguity was resolved to the preferred NP structure, prime type had no effect. These results suggest that structural priming in comprehension is modulated by the baseline frequency of alternative structures, with the less frequent structure being more subject to structural priming effects. These results are discussed in the context of the error-based, implicit learning account of structural priming.
... Results of the corpus study by Feng and Xu (2002) indicated that the right-branching structure was more preferred: almost 3 times more right-branching than left-branching analyses. However, the corpus study by Zhang, Zhang, and Shu (2000) showed that for the same word string, 70% were left-branching. In addition, results of their self-paced word-by-word reading study also supported the RC preference. ...
... The current study investigates the early preference and a possible later structural shift for V +N1+de+N2. If the initial preference is a right-branching structure, as Ng and Fodor (2011) argue, and by the end of the string the RC analysis is preferred, as Zhang et al. (2000) argue, what would be the reason for the change? This is especially an important question given that the shift violates several structural principles. ...
... But if N2 is more likely to be the object, the rightbranching parse would be facilitated. To look into this possibility, we conducted a plausibility norming study, in which 20 native Mandarin speakers were required to judge, on a Likert scale of 1 to 5 (1=not plausible and 5=very plausible), the plausibility of the event described in a sentence (similar to the norming study in Zhang, et al., 2000). The words in the V+N1+de+N2 fragments used in Experiment 1b were rearranged to yield two types of sentences, each of which represented the respective right-branching and RC reading of a fragment. ...
This study investigates, through gap-filler processing in Mandarin Chinese, whether reanalysis is undertaken to fulfill semantic requirements, even at the expense of structural economy. The construction of interest is Verb+Noun1+de+Noun2, which contains a subject gap and can be ambiguous between a left-branching (relative clause (RC)) and a right branching (main clause or subject clause) analysis. In the RC analysis, N2 is the filler for the gap. In the right-branching analysis, the gap may co-refer with a noun in the main clause that follows N2 or is interpreted contextually. Sentence completion results showed that the right-branching analysis was initially preferred but the RC analysis increased substantially at the end of the construction. Self-paced reading results indicated that disambiguation in favor of the right-branching analysis in the sentence segment following V+N1+de+N2 produced a longer reading time. These findings suggest that the Chinese parser will trade a structurally simpler (right-branching analysis) for a more complex analysis (RC) to provide a filler for an identified gap and therefore the semantic content for an argument. The overall implication is a human sentence processor allows for reanalysis if it can produce a more meaningful output.
... Using a self-paced word-by-word reading paradigm, Zhang et al. (2000) investigated the Verb NP 1 de NP 2 construction, which is temporarily ambiguous between a complement clause (CC) structure ( Figure 1a) and a relative clause (RC) structure ( Figure 1b). ...
... The syntactic ambiguity, Verb NP 1 de NP 2 , is ambiguous between a relative clause (RC) and a complement clause (CC) analysis. Crucially, the RC is the preferred analysis, based on structural simplicity, semantic completeness, corpus statistics (Zhang et al., 2000), and sentence completion data (Hsieh et al., 2009). ...
Four reading-time studies in the dissertation investigated the online representation of a syntactic ambiguity and the nature of the time course of the interaction between syntactic and non-syntactic constraints. The target syntactic ambiguity was the construction of Verb NP1 de NP2 in Chinese, which is ambiguous between a relative clause (RC) and a complement clause (CC) analysis.
Using an eye-tracking paradigm, Experiments 1 and 2 explored whether the parser can maintain multiple alternative structures of an ambiguity and how semantic plausibility influences the early stage of syntactic processing. The results demonstrated that the degree of processing difficulty at the disambiguation varied as a function of the relative support for the RC and the CC alternatives from the syntactic and the semantic constraints. The findings can be best accounted for by a limited, ranked parallel parsing model, such as the surprisal theory (Hale, 2001), which maintains that processing difficulty is incurred by resource reallocation during disambiguation.
Experiments 3 and 4 utilized syntactic priming to investigate how recent prior experience with a particular structure can influence syntactic ambiguity resolution in comprehension. Experiment 3 showed that lexically independent priming in comprehension facilitated the accessibility of the repeated RC structure, increasing the difficulty of structural revision to the unprimed CC alternative. Experiment 4 found that prior experience with the English RC structure affected the processing of the corresponding structure in Chinese, even though the RC structures differ in word order in the two languages. The observed syntactic priming in comprehension between Chinese and English RC structures suggested that the two languages have a shared syntactic representation that does not specify word order.
Overall, the dissertation contributes to the understanding of structural representation and information integration during syntactic ambiguity resolution. The findings provided evidence for an interactive and limited parallel approach to sentence processing. Moreover, lexically independent comprehension priming suggested that prior experience with a particular syntactic configuration can function as a constraint at the structural level. Thus, a traditional constraint-based lexicalist theory (e.g. MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994) must incorporate non-lexical representations in order to make use of statistical regularities beyond the lexical level.
... Based on accumulating evidence, it appeared that complex sentence processing was probably driven by word-order analysis, supported by the LIFG [27,28]. However, some concerns may challenge this assumption because increased brain activation in Chinese RC processing may be partially due to the temporal ambiguity between a complement clause analysis and a head-final RC analysis for Chinese SRC construction, rather than the word order effect between Chinese SRCs and ORCs [29,30]. Therefore, we here investigated another set of Chinese RCs, object-modifying relative clauses (OM-RCs) in which the RCs were used to modify the matrix object of the sentence (as examples shown in Table 1 below) to remove the abovementioned concern. ...
Although the connection between the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and the left superior temporal gyrus (LSTG) has been found to be essential for the comprehension of relative clause (RC) sentences, it remains unclear how the LIFG and the LSTG interact with each other, especially during the processing of Chinese RC sentences with different processing difficulty. This study thus conducted a 2 × 2 (modifying position × extraction position) factorial analyses to examine how these two factors influences regional brain activation. The results showed that, regardless of the modifying position, greater activation in the LIFG was consistently elicited in Chinese subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs) with non-canonical word order than object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) with canonical word order, implying that the LIFG subserving the ordering process primarily contributes to the processing of information with increased integration demands due to the non-canonical sequence. Moreover, the directional connection between the LIFG and the LSTG appeared to be modulated by different modifying positions. When the RC was at the subject-modifying position, the effective connectivity from the LIFG to the LSTG was dominantly activated for sentence comprehension; whereas when the RC was at the object-modifying position thus being more difficult, it might be the feedback mechanism from the LSTG back to the LIFG that took place in sentence processing. These findings reveal that brain activation in between the LIFG and the LSTG may be dynamically modulated by different processing difficulty and suggest the relative specialization but extensive collaboration involved in the LIFG and the LSTG for sentence comprehension.
... This result may be related to the fact each of these two types of ambiguous structure has a definite meaning, making it necessary to clearly differentiate between them based on the prosodic boundary. In addition, although previous studies indicated a preference ratio for the Chinese ambiguous phrase VP NP1 de NP2 (Wei, Dong, Bland, & Yuan, 2016;Zhang, Zhang, & Shu, 2000), this preference seems to disappear when the speaker provides an obvious prosodic break (the ambiguous phrases used in the present study were balanced between the MNC and the NOS). Thus, once the listeners detect a prosodic boundary, a CPS reflecting prosodic segmentation will be evoked. ...
... The effect of word order violation was in line with a great number of previous studies reporting prolonged viewing durations and more regressions for sentences with ambiguities or errors (for a review, see Rayner, 1998; for the study on Chinese, see Shi et al., 2000;Zhang et al., 2000Zhang et al., , 2002Hsieh et al., 2009). In particular, the violation of word order was immediately detected at the head noun, resulting in an increase of gaze duration, which is commonly considered to indicate the difficulty of lexical access during sentence reading (Rayner, 2009;Yan et al., 2014). ...
Prosodic constraints play a fundamental role during both spoken sentence comprehension and silent reading. In Chinese, the rhythmic pattern of the verb-object (V-O) combination has been found to rapidly affect the semantic access/integration process during sentence reading (Luo and Zhou, 2010). Rhythmic pattern refers to the combination of words with different syllabic lengths, with certain combinations disallowed (e.g., [2 + 1]; numbers standing for the number of syllables of the verb and the noun respectively) and certain combinations preferred (e.g., [1 + 1] or [2 + 2]). This constraint extends to the situation in which the combination is used to modify other words. A V-O phrase could modify a noun by simply preceding it, forming a V-O-N compound; when the verb is disyllabic, however, the word order has to be O-V-N and the object is preferred to be disyllabic. In this study, we investigated how the reader processes the rhythmic pattern and word order information by recording the reader's eye-movements. We created four types of sentences by crossing rhythmic pattern and word order in compounding. The compound, embedding a disyllabic verb, could be in the correct O-V-N or the incorrect V-O-N order; the object could be disyllabic or monosyllabic. We found that the reader spent more time and made more regressions on and after the compounds when either type of anomaly was detected during the first pass reading. However, during re-reading (after all the words in the sentence have been viewed), less regressive eye movements were found for the anomalous rhythmic pattern, relative to the correct pattern; moreover, only the abnormal rhythmic pattern, not the violated word order, influenced the regressive eye movements. These results suggest that while the processing of rhythmic pattern and word order information occurs rapidly during the initial reading of the sentence, the process of recovering from the rhythmic pattern anomaly may ease the reanalysis processing at the later stage of sentence integration. Thus, rhythmic pattern in Chinese can dynamically affect both local phrase analysis and global sentence integration during silent reading.
This article explores the domain generality of hierarchical representation between linguistic and mathematical cognition by adopting the structural priming paradigm in an eye-tracking reading experiment. The experiment investigated whether simple arithmetic equations with high (e.g., (7 + 2) × 3 + 1)- or low (e.g., 7 + 2 × 3 + 1)- attachment influence language users’ interpretation of Chinese ambiguous structures (NP1 + He + NP2 + De + NP3; Quantifier + NP1 + De + NP2; NP1 + Kan/WangZhe + NP2 + AP). On the one hand, behavioral results showed that high-attachment primes led to more high-attachment interpretation, while low-attachment primes led to more low-attachment interpretation. On the other hand, the eye movement data indicated that structural priming was of great help to reduce dwell time on the ambiguous structure. There were structural priming effects from simple arithmetic to three different structures in Chinese, which provided new evidence on the cross-domain priming from simple arithmetic to language. Besides attachment priming effect at global level, online sentence integration at local level was found to be structure-dependent by some differences in eye movement measures. Our results have provided some evidence for the Representational Account.
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