Processing Japanese subject and object relative clauses by advanced learners: Comparison with native speakers by a whole-sentence reading experiment

摘要

Previous studies have shown that subject relative clauses (SRCs) are easier to process than object relative clauses (ORCs) in Japanese both for native speakers and elementary learners. They argued that the results can be explained by the Structural Distance Hypothesis (SDH). In the present study, we conducted a whole-sentence reading experiment, with advanced Chinese-speaking learners (CLJ; N=21) and native speakers of Japanese (NSJ; N=24) as participants. We examined whether SDH can accurately predict the processing difficulty of SRCs and ORCs for advanced learners. Results revealed that CLJ read SRCs faster than ORCs, whereas NSJ read ORCs faster than SRCs. This indicates that SDH can predict processing difficulty even for advanced learners, but that processing difficulty might vary depending on the task type.