The Processing of Dui-construction in Chinese

Yong Zhai

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DOI: 10.4236/psych.2011.26086                

Abstract

In the present study, I examined the Dui-construction from a psycholinguistic perspective. Two experiments on the processing of Dui-constructions have been carried out to reexamine the findings of previous experiments on empty subjects in English and Japanese. There are two advantages of using the Chinese Dui-construction over English and Japanese. Firstly, Chinese is similar to English in that the verb is located before the empty subject of an infinitival clause. It is therefore possible to verify whether the verb control information is delayed or not in this case. Secondly, Chinese is similar to Japanese in that they both allow scrambling of arguments. As such, I can examine whether the recency hypothesis applies to Chinese or not. The results indicated that 1) The control information of the verb is accessed immediately; 2) The recency hypothesis is not supported in the processing of Duii-constructions. In other words, there exists a language-specific processing system independent of the general recency strategy.

Keywords

Dui-construction, Recency Hypothesis, Control Information, Chinese

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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