Dr. Chin Lung Yang, associate professor from the Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics, City University of Hong Kong, gave faculty members and graduate students a lecture onThe Real-time Comprehension of Chinese Relative-Clause Sentenceson November 14, 2012.

In the lecture, Dr. Yang talked about his research on subject/object-extracted relative clauses, which 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. Research on object-subject processing asymmetry in Chinese relative clauses has reached varying results, especially those with head-final RC constructions. In his study, Dr. Yang approached this issue by adopting multi-disciplinary methodologies, including behavioral research, eye-tracking and event-related potentials. The results demonstrated that the comprehension of sentences with head-final RCs is modulated by processing complexity, factors including structural organization of a language and constraints of memory resources in reading increment.