Sentence Processing in Chinese and Chinese-English Bilinguals: Syntax-Semantics Interaction During Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution.

Abstract

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.