When is the object relative clause easier to process than the subject relative clause? (思考と言語)

Subject relative clauses (SRCs) are processed more easily than object relative clauses (ORCs) in many languages. The present study aims to test the theories that have tried to explain why such an asymmetry exists in relative clause processing, focusing on the PDC approach (Gennari & MacDonald, 2008, 2009) that assumes that production, corpus distribution, and comprehension are closely related to each other. We conducted a gated sentence completion experiment and a self-paced reading experiment. Although the results do not show complete agreement between production and comprehension, the PDC approach captures many aspects of our results that is difficult to cover by other theories. Keyword Sentence processing,relative clause,self-paced reading task,gated sentence completion task

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