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Mandarin relative clauses present challenges for incrementality as they are initially ambiguous, with the relative clause marker appearing only at the end of the clause. It has been proposed that linguistic cues may facilitate relative clause prediction, although previous findings regarding cues such as classifier-noun mismatch are mixed. We examined whether a different type of cue, temporal mismatch, serves as an effective relative clause prediction cue. ERP results (N=74) show that temporal mismatches engendered by both adverbs and aspectual markers facilitate relative clause prediction, suggesting that the parser can use linguistic cues to predict syntactic structures and achieve incremental processing.
Xiao Yang
PhD candidate, Linguistics
University of Kansas
xiaoyang@ku.edu | emilyyangxiao@gmail.com
https://people.ku.edu/~x593y846/