Parallelism Effects In Chinese Coordinate Structures

In sentence comprehension,people tend to understand similar syntactic constitutes in a sentence more quickly.When subjects read two phrases or clauses with the same syntactic structure,the second constituent of parallel structures is processed faster when it parallels the first constituent in comparison with when it does not parallel the first constituent.And this phenomenon was named as parallelism effects(Frazier et.al,1984).In English,there are the parallelism effects in coordinate structure which is also a common type of phrase structure in Chinese,so Chinese coordinate structure's process is supposed to have this effect.Furthermore,certain coordinate phrase structures with or without coordinating marker are coexistence in Chinese such as coordinate structure with conjunction "HE"(and)or punctuation maker "?�,as well as label free coordinate structure.Studying these syntactic process plays a promoting role in the study of proceeding syntactic structures in human brain.However,there is little research on the parallelism effects of different constructions in Chinese,so it is worth studying in this paper.This thesis focuses on the following two research questions:1)Whether there is parallelism effects in processing these three types of Chinese sentence structures:the coordinate structure with "and",the coordinate structure with punctuation marker"?" as well as the label free coordinate structure?2)What is the significant difference among coordinate structure with "and" or"?"as well as the label free coordinate structure during their reading process?3)If there is parallelism effects in the processing of the these three types of Chinese coordinate structures,what is the mechanism for the existence of parallelism effects,syntactic prediction or syntactic priming?In this experiment,41 Chinese native speakers were recruited.All the subjects were from different schools of Hunan University.The design of the experimental materials was based on the research of Patrick Sturt(2010).The experimental method was eye movement technique in order to to test a total of 110 experimental sentences and to record the data of four indecies of eye movements.The experimental results show that:1)there were parallelism effects in coordinate structure with "HE" or punctuation maker"?",while the parallel ism effects in processing of label free coordinate structure is not obvious.2)there are significant differences among these three Chinese coordinate structures during their reading process.3)the parallelism effects in Chinese coordinate structure is a special form of syntactic prediction,and it is not the result of syntactic priming.There are some controversies about the cause of parallelism effects all the time.Some scholars think that it is syntactic prediction;others hold it as syntactic priming.According to previous definition of these two causes or mechanisms,syntactic prediction is stricter,which not only needs to have two parallel components,but also the predicting words.However,syntactic priming focuses on the parallelism of two components as the priming and target items respectively.The results of this experiment were in accordance with the syntactic prediction mechanism.