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Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics edited by Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon ISBN 1-57473-415-6 library binding vii+461 pages publication date: 2006 published by Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA Table of contents Abstract Chien-Jer Charles Lin and Thomas G. Bever Subject Preference in the Processing of Relative Clauses in Chinese 254-260 (complete pdf) A controversy regarding relative-clause processing was raised by Hsiao and Gibson (2003), who showed a processing preference for object extractions in Mandarin Chinese. This article argues that Hsiao and Gibson's claim of an object preference was invalid as their experiment was confounded. Two sets of experimental evidence from Mandarin -- the self-paced reading of regular relative clauses and that of possessor relative clauses -- showed a preference for subject extractions. As the controversy is removed, the Incremental Minimalist Parsing theory is discussed to account for this universal parsing preference. |