Engelmann, Kuo and Vasishth

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

Cross-linguistically, subject relative clauses tend to be easier to
process than object relatives. Recently, Hsiao and Gibson (2003)
presented a surprising result that was subsequently 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. Theories that
rely on word-order regularities (Christiansen and MacDonald 2002,
Bever 1970) can predict the Hsiao and Gibson finding correctly: word
order in object relatives is SVO (the canonical order for Chinese) and
in object relatives it is VOS. By contrast, other theories fail to
explain the Chinese facts. For example, (i) Keenan and Comrie (1977)
rely on the greater accessibility of subjects compared to objects,
(ii) MacWhinney (1977) invokes the need to shift perspective from
subject to object in object relatives, which is harder in object
relatives than subject, (iii) Mitchell (1995) argues that structural
frequency of syntactic frames determines parsing difficulty, and since
subject relatives are more frequent than object, they should be easier
to process.

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

First, we examine the simple recurrent network (SRN) model, which has
been cited in the context of the Chinese results (Hsiao and Gibson
2003: 15) as an instantiation of the word order theory. The
predictions of an SRN such as Christiansen and MacDonald's have never
been compared to reading times seen in Chinese relative clauses -- it
is merely assumed that the SRN makes the correct predictions for the
results Hsiao and Gibson found. We present the predictions of an SRN
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 ensured that the SRN displays
nearly-identical behavior to published connectionist simulations
involving Dutch and German center embeddings and ungrammatical English
center embeddings -- the model architecture is thus comparable to
previous published models. The SRN was trained on a simplified
grammar of Chinese based on structural frequencies in the Sinica
Corpus 3.0 (5 million words). On the region preceding the relativizer
de the network predictions showed a tendency towards a subject
relative preference which is contrary to Hsiao and Gibson's
results. The other regions did not show any significant difference.

The difficulties faced by the connectionist model in predicting the
Chinese reading times cast doubt on the connectionist instantiation of
the word order regularity explanation.

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 many other languages, more
frequent than object relatives, and this frequency pattern predicts
the subject-relative preference correctly. Using the Sinica Corpus,
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. Independent evidence consistent with this
idea is presented by Lin and Garnsey (2007).

In sum, based on a series of simulations and a self-paced reading
experiment, we argue that (a) the word-order explanation for relative
clauses as instantiated by connectionist models may be problematic,
and (b) theories that predict the subject-preference
cross-linguistically (structural-frequency, accessibility, and
perspective) may be more compelling.

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.'

MacDonald,M. C., & Christiansen, M. H. (2002). Reassessing working
memory: A reply to Just
and Carpenter andWaters and
Caplan. Psychological Review, 109(1), 35-54.

Hsiao, F. P.-F., & Gibson, E. (2003). Processing relative clauses in
Chinese. Cognition, 90, 3-27.

Lin, Y. B., & Garnsey, S.M. (2007). Plausibility and the resolution of
temporary ambiguity in relativeclause comprehension in mandarin. In
Proceedings of the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference.