外国语言学及应用语言学研究中心论坛
脑与语言实验室 www.gwball.com
讲 座
Dr Chin Lung Yang
The City University of Hong Kong
题目: The Real-time Comprehension of Chinese Relative-Clause Sentences
（中文关系从句的实时理解）
时间：2012年11月14日（星期三） 下午4:00 – 5:00
讲座提纲：Relative clause (RC) construction has been widely used as stimuli in sentence studies of experimental psycholinguistics to probe the nature of underlying cognitive mechanisms of language comprehension and in the development of theoretical frameworks of sentence comprehension (Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Gibson, 1998; Gordon, Hendrick, & Johnson, 2001; MacWhinney & Pleh, 1988; Trueswell, Tanehaus, & Garnsey, 1994). Nevertheless, cross-linguistic examination on the object-subject processing asymmetry in English RCs has reported varying results, specifically for languages with head-final RC constructions (see Yamashita, Hirose, & Packard, 2011, for a review). One major reason lies in the fact that these studies of the RC processing asymmetry seem to overlook how memory constraint interacts with linguistic constraint in the context of contrasting linear ordering involving unexpressed logical NPs and modified head nouns in head-initial vs. head-final RC constructions. In the seminar talk, I approach this issue by examining the linguistic and cognitive factors involved in the object-/subject-extracted RC processing differences of head-final RC constructions in Chinese with multi-disciplinary methodologies (e.g., behavioral and eye-tracking). The results demonstrate how the pre-nominal, head-final ordering of a RC construction might readily invite processing complexity that was jointly contributed by the structurally factor and its interaction with the allocation of memory resources during the timecourse of word-by-word reading integration.
个人简介：Dr. Chin Lung Yang is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong. He applies multi-disciplinary cognitive/neurocognitive paradigms to the study of higher-order language comprehension in reading and language learning across different language systems, with a focus on Chinese and English. His central research theme examines the cognitive/neurocognitive bases of the way the language-specific properties of languages modulate the interaction between syntactic and sequential constraints of a language and the semantic/pragmatic interpretation of linguistic inputs in achieving language comprehension. His works appeared in, among other journals, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Cognition, Applied Cognitive Psychology, Language and Linguistics, and Brain and Language.
