Rapid Parallel Visual Presentation Provides a New Perspective on Relative Clause Processing in Mandarin Chinese

A fundamental question in language processing research is the degree to which the acceptability and ease of interpretation of a sentence are affected by the moment-by-moment memory encoding and retrieval processes needed to process it in time, vs. the properties of the linguistic representation itself, such as syntactic complexity. This manuscript investigates relative clauses, a crucial testing ground for theories of language processing, using parallel presentation, a technique in which the key elements of the target syntactic dependency are displayed to the visual system at the same time. Compared to serial presentation, parallel presentation mitigates the extent to which complex memory operations must be deployed to process the structure word-by-word. We report on an electroencephalography (EEG) experiment in Mandarin Chinese. Participants were presented with sentences which contained either a subject- or object-modifying subject- or object-extracted relative clause. Sentence presentation was split across two separate screens, with each screen being displayed only for 166ms on average. We find a behavioral preference for subject-extracted relative clauses and distinct EEG signatures for subject- and object-extracted relative clauses. Together, these results - on account of the parallel presentation scheme applied here - provide support for the independent contribution of linguistic representation in processing difficulty and the perspective that relative clause processing involves more than the factors that word by word accounts of this phenomenon would suggest. Further, the EEG result contributes to a growing body of electrophysiology literature attempting to illuminate the processing mechanisms deployed in the context of parallel presentation.