고려대학교

초록/요약

Kim, Chae-Eun. 2015. Processing Subject and Indirect Object Relative Clauses. The Journal of Studies in Language 31.3, 583-604. This study examines whether native speakers of English process relative clauses in the order predicted by Keenan and Comrie’s (1977) Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (NPAH) hypothesis and its application in sentence processing. This study compared both comprehension accuracy and total reading times in subject and indirect object relative clauses. Both subject and indirect object relatives typically take animate heads. Thus, the study had a purer test of the effect of the length of the filler-gap dependency controlling the animacy factor of the heads. Data were collected from forty-two adult speakers, using a self-paced reading task. The results of this study suggest that although comprehension score showed no difference between two types of relative clauses, sentences with indirect object relatives were more difficult to process than subject relatives, and this difficulty increased in the relative clause regions and the main verb region because readers spent more time in reading sentences with indirect relatives than with subject relatives. The evidence that was gathered here demonstrates that subject relatives are less complex than indirect object relatives in English, similar to the results in the literature for the similar constructions (i.e. comparison subject relatives vs. object relatives) in other languages. The results support the length of the filler-gap dependency demonstrating that dependencies have more difficult computation in indirect object relatives than in subject relatives because of the lexical material between the filler and the gap. (Korea University)