Elaine Lau

The question of whether there exists a universal subject preference in relativization has stimulated research in a wide range of languages and across different domains, yielding an extensive body of literature in relative clause acquisition and processing. In this article, we aim at consolidating the efforts of existing research in order to inform further exploration of the universality of the subject preference with a comprehensive analysis of relevant work (including journal articles on empirical studies, dissertations, and conference proceedings). We present an overview of the proposals regarding the source(s) of the subject-object asymmetry from a cross-linguistic perspective and discuss commonly used methodologies in this research area, and we survey the research on relative clause processing and acquisition of different linguistic communities, including native speakers, second language learners, clinical populations, and heritage speakers.

This study examines long-standing claims that L2 learners rely more on non-grammatical than on grammatical information during sentence processing compared to native speakers. Nominal classifiers in Mandarin Chinese offer an ideal opportunity to test this claim, as they simultaneously encode semantic as well as grammatical form-class cues about co-occurring nouns. This paper reports findings from a visual world eye-tracking experiment with L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin, which was designed to assess listeners’ relative reliance on these two concurrently available cues when creating expectations about an upcoming noun in a sentence. Results show that L2 listeners experienced greater competition than L1 listeners from nouns that were grammatically incompatible with the classifier they heard but shared semantic features associated with it. The greater reliance on semantic cues observed in L2 processing is argued to be an effect of adaptation to the relative reliability of information, serving to maximise L2 processing efficiency.

This study explores to what extent L2 learners of Chinese derive predictions from semantic vs. grammatical constraints on classifier-noun co-occurrence. In a Mandarin adaptation of Tsang and Chambers’ (2011) Visual-World experiment with native Cantonese speakers, we find that both L1 and L2 speakers of Mandarin draw on information encoded by sortal classifiers to anticipate upcoming nouns. However, upon hearing the classifier (e.g., tiáo, ‘long/narrow’), L2 but not L1 listeners showed increased looks to objects which cannot co-occur with the classifier but nevertheless share some of its semantic features (e.g., shǒubiǎo ‘wristwatch’, which is long and narrow, but cannot co-occur with tiáo), suggesting L2 learners give more weight to semantic vs. form-class cues than native speakers. This provides support for Lau and Grüter’s (2015) hypothesis that the semantic informativity of classifiers makes it easier for L2 learners to use classifiers for predictive processing than gender-marked articles in European languages. Moreover, these findings are consistent with accounts of L2 processing that propose generally greater reliance on lexico-semantic information in L2 than in L1 processing (e.g., Felser et al., 2003; Van Patten, 2004), and extend the observation to predictive processing. We argue that the observed differences between L1 and L2 listeners do not stem from L2 listeners’ inability to use grammatical or form-class cues, but that due to differences in attention to different unit sizes during L2 vs. L1 learning (Arnon & Ramscar, 2012), semantic cues have relatively greater utility than form-class cues for prediction in an L2 compared to an L1.

Native (L1) speakers take advantage of prenominal cues, such as gender-marked articles and classifiers, to identify an upcoming noun during online processing (e.g., Lew-Williams & Fernald, 2007; Huettig et al., 2010). The extent to which non-native (L2) speakers are able to do so remains a topic of on-going investigation. Findings from learners of gender-marking languages have not been entirely consistent, and point to the influence of a number of language- and learner-specific factors, as discussed in more detail below. No previous findings from L2 learners of classifier languages are available, as far as we know. The goal of the present study is to extend research on the facilitatory effect of prenominal cues in the online processing of an L2 by looking at classifiers in Chinese, which are both similar and different along potentially relevant dimensions from gender-marked articles in Indo-European languages. We report the findings from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment with L1 and L2 speakers of Chinese, closely following the procedures and design of Lew-Williams and Fernald’s (2007, 2010) work on the processing of gender-marked articles in L1 and L2 Spanish.