Reassessing the Influence of Experience-based and Resource-based Constraints on Comprehending Mixed-headed Relative Clause Sentences in Mandarin Chinese

This article examined the extent to which the processing of comprehending complex sentences in Mandarin Chinese is guided by an individual’s experience or resource limitations by focusing on the processing mechanism in the context of headedness differences (head-initial vs. head-final) in the relative clause configurations. Across three experiments, native Chinese speakers read Mandarin relative clause sentences with a “mixed-headed” configuration: i.e., the main clause is head-initial, whereas the relative clause is head-final. The “mixed-headed” structure provides a highly contrastive test case to disentangle the relative dominance of experience and resource constraints in producing the sentence complexity effect as the relative clause unfolds. Experiment 1 used a gated completion task to track the interpretation preferences at each position in the ambiguous relative clause string. Experiment 2 employed both self-paced reading and eye-tracking to validate the effect of the experience-based expectation cross-methodologically. Experiment 3 assessed the processing dynamics between experience and memory factors with the form of the relative clause noun varied in different types (i.e., descriptions vs. indexical pronouns), using self-paced reading. In contrast to previously predominant views that the relative clause comprehension difficulty results from various sources of the clause properties, not their ambiguities, the results indicate that the initial reading of the head-final relative clause components is highly ambiguous and that its moment-by-moment processing is also highly resource-taxing. The pattern provides insights into cross-linguistic examinations of the sentence complexity effects. Comprehension difficulty reflects the prominence of experience-driven predictions that preserve resource-based memory operations. The head noun’s directionality variation may affect the relative dominance of experience and memory factors over the time course of processing.