Natural language research announcements

[Margaret Fleck <mfleck AT cs.uiuc.edu>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: LPBB
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 08:14:45 -0600
From: Sarah Brown-Schmidt 
<brownsch AT uiuc.edu>
 (by way of Judy Allen)
To: Recipient List Suppressed:;


This week's LPBB will be presented by Susan Garnsey (see abstract below).

The talk will be this Thursday, Dec 1st at 12:30 in room 4269 at
Beckman. See you there!

> > Relative Clause Comprehension in Mandarin

> > Yowyu Lin & Susan M. Garnsey

> > Abstract: Speakers of both English and Japanese find object relative
> > clauses harder to understand than subject relatives. Although these
> > languages differ in many ways (default word order, whether relative
> > clauses follow or precede the head nouns they modify, etc.), they have
> > in common that subject relatives follow the default word order pattern,
> > while object relatives do not. In contrast, in Mandarin it is object
> > relatives that have the default word order, leading Hsiao and Gibson
> > (2003) to predict that they should be easier in Mandarin, and they
> > collected reading time data that provided weak support for their
> > prediction. In two Mandarin reading time studies, we found and
> > replicated robust support for this prediction, but we also found that
> > differences between subject and object relatives disappeared when head
> > nouns were less confusable with other nouns in the sentences,
> > consistent with Lewis' (1999) claims about the role of similarity-based
> > interference during sentence comprehension.