Processing causal structure sentences in Mandarin Chinese: an eye movements study

It remains uncertain whether causal structure prediction can improve comprehension in Chinese sentences and whether the position of the headword mediates the prediction effect. We conducted an experiment to explore the effect of causal prediction and headword position in Chinese sentence reading. Pa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PeerJ (San Francisco, CA) CA), 2024-08, Vol.12, p.e17878
Main Authors: Gao, Lei, Li, Lin, Gao, Xiaolei, Sui, Xue
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Causal syntactic structure
China
Chinese sentence reading
Comprehension - physiology
Computational linguistics
East Asian People
Eye movement
Eye Movements - physiology
Female
Humans
Language
Language processing
Linear mixed model
Male
Natural language interfaces
Reading
Semantics
Young Adult
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Summary:It remains uncertain whether causal structure prediction can improve comprehension in Chinese sentences and whether the position of the headword mediates the prediction effect. We conducted an experiment to explore the effect of causal prediction and headword position in Chinese sentence reading. Participants were asked to read sentences containing causal connectives with their eye movements recorded. In the experiment, we manipulated the causal structure of the sentence and the position of the headword. We found a promoting effect of causal structure on first-pass reading time and a hindering impact on total reading time. However, the effect was not mediated by the headword position. The results show that causal syntactic prediction facilitated early-stage processing and increased the integration cost in the late stage of Chinese sentence processing. These findings also support the constraint-based approach, which suggests an isolation between semantic and syntactic processing.
ISSN:2167-8359
2167-8359
DOI:10.7717/peerj.17878