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The Relationship Between Anaphor Features and Antecedent Retrieval: Comparing Mandarin Ziji and Ta-Ziji

Dillon, B; Chow, W-Y; Xiang, M; (2016) The Relationship Between Anaphor Features and Antecedent Retrieval: Comparing Mandarin Ziji and Ta-Ziji. Frontiers in Psychology , 6 , Article 1966. 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01966. Green open access

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Abstract

In the present study we report two self-paced reading experiments that investigate antecedent retrieval processes in sentence comprehension by contrasting the real-time processing behavior of two different reflexive anaphors in Mandarin Chinese. Previous work has suggested that comprehenders initially evaluate the fit between the morphologically simple long-distance reflexive “ziji” and the closest available subject position, only subsequently considering more structurally distant antecedents (Gao et al., 2005; Liu, 2009; Li and Zhou, 2010; Dillon et al., 2014; cf. Chen et al., 2012). In this paper, we investigate whether this locality bias effect obtains for other reflexive anaphors in Mandarin Chinese, or if it is associated specifically with the morphologically simple reflexive ziji. We do this by comparing the processing of ziji to the processing of the morphologically complex reflexive ta-ziji (lit. s/he-self). In Experiment 1, we investigate the processing of ziji, and replicate the finding of a strong locality bias effect for ziji in self-paced reading measures. In Experiment 2, we investigate the processing of the morphologically complex reflexive ta-ziji in the same structural configurations as Experiment 1. A comparison of our experiments reveals that ta-ziji shows a significantly weaker locality bias effect than ziji does. We propose that this results from the difference in the number of morphological and semantic features on the anaphor ta-ziji relative to ziji. Specifically, we propose that the additional retrieval cues associated with ta-ziji reduce interference from irrelevant representations in memory, allowing it to more reliably access an antecedent regardless its linear or structural distance. This reduced interference in turn leads to a diminished locality bias effect for the morphologically complex anaphor ta-ziji.

Type: Article
Title: The Relationship Between Anaphor Features and Antecedent Retrieval: Comparing Mandarin Ziji and Ta-Ziji
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01966
Publisher version: http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01966
Language: English
Additional information: © 2016 Dillon, Chow and Xiang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Keywords: sentence processing, Mandarin Chinese, long-distance reflexives, working memory, referential processing
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1473862
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