Engelmann, Kuo and Vasishth Version 1

The Chinese subject-object relative asymmetry:
A computational and corpus investigation
Felix Engelmann, Kueilan Kuo and Shravan Vasishth

Cross-linguistically, subject relative clauses tend to be easier to
process than object relatives. However, Hsiao and Gibson (2003)
presented a surprising result that was recently replicated by Lin and
Garnsey (2007): in Chinese, subject relatives like (1a) are harder to
process than object relatives (1b).

This result is striking because it dramatically shrinks the space of
theoretical explanations for relative-clause processing. Since word
order in object relatives is SVO (the canonical order for Chinese) and
in object relatives it is VOS, theories that rely on word-order
regularities (Christiansen and MacDonald 2002, Bever 1970) can predict
the Hsiao and Gibson finding correctly, but other theories fail, such
as Keenan and Comrie's (1977) which relies on the different degrees of
accessibility of subjects versus objects, MacWhinney's (1977), which
invokes the need to shift perspective from subject to object in object
relatives (MacWhinney 1977), and structural frequency (Mitchell 1995),
which asssumed that the frequency of syntactic frames determines
parsing difficulty.

We make two contributions to this interesting finding by Hsiao and
Gibson.

First, although connectionist models have been cited (Hsiao
and Gibson 2003: 15) as an instantiation of the word order theory, the
predictions of a simple recurrent network model such as Christiansen
and MacDonald's have never been compared to moment-by-moment reading
times seen in Chinese relative clauses -- it is merely assumed that
the word-order theories (like the connectionist model) would be correct for
the results Hsiao and Gibson found. We present the predictions of a
simple recurrent network for Chinese relative clause processing, and
show that the predictions are rather mixed and do not point to clear
support for an SRN-based explanation. In our simulations, we took the
precaution of ensuring that our SRN displays identical behavior to
published connectionst simulations involving Dutch and German center
embeddings and ungrammatical English center embeddings -- the model
architecture is thus identical to previous published models. The mixed
nature of the connectionist model's predictions thus poses considerable
problems for the word-order based accont.

Second, we repeated the Hsiao and Gibson study using their stimuli in
a self-paced reading study. We found, contrary to their results, that
Chinese in fact shows a subject preference; independent research on
Chinese relatives supports our findings (Lin and Bever 2006), (Su et
al 2007).

We suggest that the best explanation for the subject-object relative
clause asymmetry lies in the relative frequencies of syntactic frames:
subject relatives in Chinese are, as in other languages, more frequent
than object relatives and this frequency-pattern predicts the
subject-relative preference correctly. Using Sinica Corpus (5 million
words), we present evidence supporting this view. In addition, we
argue that the frequency patterns of noun-phrases animacy (animates
tend to occur before inanimates more frequently) may exert an
independent influence on processing difficulty.

In sum, we argue that (a) the word-order explanation for relative
clauses as instantiated by connectinoist models may be problematic,
and (b) the data available so far argues in favor of the
structural-frequency account of relative-clause processing.

1a. Subject relative
[GAP yaoqing fuhao de] guanyuan xinhuaibugui
invite tycoon gen official have bad intentions
'The official who invited the tycoon has bad intentions.'

1b. Object relative
[fuhao yaoqing GAP de] guanyuan xinhuaibugui
tycoon invite gen official have bad intentions
'The official who the tycoon invited has bad intentions.'


References:

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