An ERP Study In English Relative Clause Processing For Chinese-English Bilinguals

The study on relative clause processing mechanism receives much concern from linguists. In previous studies on sentence parsing and comprehension, much evidence indicates that English subject relative clauses have processing preference than object clauses, which received support from many other alphabetic languages. A controversy among the universal subject preference faces challenge when the founding that object relatives in Chinese are easier to process than subject relatives arises. However, a large body of literature provides theories related to native speakers’sentence processing mechanism leaves a relatively untouched area: bilingual’s sentence parsing mechanism research.This study is designed to examine when the parser with Chinese LI language background to process subject-extracted subject relative clause (SS) and subject-extracted object relative clauses (SO) by using event-related potentials (ERPs) to probe into the real-time language processing and presents a direct manifestation of brain activity. The founding in this study supports the subject relative clause preference due to the strong influence of English relative clause markedness and bilingual’s relative lower working memory capacity.This article reports an ERP study that manipulated the syntactic complexity (SS vs. SO), with the result of clarifying difference in each word among relative clause and the verb in matrix sentence, which confirms filler-gap dependency account and working memory capacity. Results of the ERP study indicate that a larger anterior negativity (LAN) that follows the initiation of filler and a late posterior positivity (P600) that is regarded as the point of the completion of the gap-filling dependency are sensitive in the filler-gap dependency structure in relative clauses. But the semantic-sensitive ERP components N400are not obviously observed due to the length of dependency in single-embeddedness relative clause.