Competition and Generalization in Mandarin Relative Clause Processing: A Simple Recurrent Network

摘要

Relative clauses (RCs) have been extensively studied for the processes of language comprehension. Mandarin Chinese, which has a unique pattern of word order across main clauses and RCs and has yielded conflicting results in the past literature. We implemented a Simple Recurrent Network based on a detailed corpus analysis of several features of different sentence types. In the evaluation of RC difficulty, the model showed generalization from similar structures and high error at points of ambiguity. The results suggest that sentence comprehension is a highly constraint-satisfactory process and should be accounted for by experiences not only with specific structures in question but also other similar structures in the language.