An Analysis Of Accessibility And Antecedent Animacy’s Influence On Subject/Object Relative Clause Processing

A large number of researchers in the field of Linguistics, Psychology, and Psycholinguistics have been interested in the relative clause (abbreviated as RC thereafter) construction in recent few decades for its recursive property, prevalently existing in the universal languages, etc. However, a large proportion of the previous studies on RC mainly focus on its syntactic complexity, irrespective of other factors that also contribute to the processing difficulty of this configuration. Setting Markedness Theory as the theoretical framework, the present study aims to investigate the syntactic and semantic influences on the RC processing by Chinese English learners, taking RC types (subject RC&object RC) and antecedent animacy hierarchy, RC types and antecedent typicality as the random variables for two experiments respectively.The two experiments are online studies. Through recording the reaction time for the target sentences and the accuracy for the following verification statement judgments, two self-paced reading experiments are conducted to seek insight into the RC processing by Chinese learners.32second-grade postgraduates majoring in English as the advanced group and35non-English freshmen as the low-level group for the first experiment, another33second-grade postgraduates majoring in English representing the advanced group and another35non-English freshmen representing the low-level group for the second experiment, take part in the tests. During the two experiments, both the reaction time and accuracy for the following verification statement judgments are recorded by the software of E-prime. and the data is submitted to statistical analysis by SPSS13.0. After the data collection and analysis, this study mainly obtains the following findings listed as follows.Firstly, based on the mean reaction time that the participants from both the advanced and low-level group consume to deal with the target RCs, it is reported that except the performance on the RCs with inanimate antecedent by the participants from the low-level group in the first experiment, and the RCs with penguin as the antecedent for the participants in the second experiment, reaction time on almost all the object RCs are shorter than that on the subject RCs, and the difference between them arrives at a significant level, which not only reveals that the performance of the Chinese college students are mostly in accordance with the assumption of NPAH, but also indicates that the syntactic complexity is not the only factor determining the processing difficulty of RC.Secondly, participants with different language proficiency levels depend on different language sources to process the RCs. The results of the first experiment show that the participants from the advanced group are largely influenced by the syntactic complexity but scarcely impacted by the antecedent animacy hierarchy. While the experiment results of the participants from the low-level group, by contrast, clearly tell us that the syntactic complexity of the RC does not function alone, besides the antecedent animacy degree also exerts great influence on the RC processing. Additionally, the two-way ANOVA analysis reveals that the interaction effect of RC types and antecedent animacy arrives at a significant level. In other words, both the RC types and the antecedent animacy have impact on the RC processing for the low-level group.Thirdly, as for the interactive influence of RC types and antecedent animacy on the processing difficulty for the low-level group, the results show that the reaction time associated with the object RC is gradually reduced as the antecedent changes from the human noun to the animal noun, then to the inanimate noun. Besides, compared with the processing difference between the subject RC and object RC with human noun as the antecedent, or between subject RC and object RC with animal noun as the antecedent, the processing difficulty associated with the subject RC and object RC with the inanimate antecedent develops in a reversed way, i.e. the reaction time on the subject RC exceeds that on the object RC.At last, the second experiment explores in a deeper way to investigate whether the RC types interact with antecedent typicality in the RC processing when the animacy hierarchy of the antecedent is fixed. The results show that only the RC types exert significant influence on the RC processing for the participants from the low-level group, but the antecedent typicality does not. This finding might indicate that the RC types override antecedent typicality in determining the processing difficulty of RC.