The Role of Embedded Noun Phrase Syntactic Category in Processing Subject and Object Relative Clauses in Persian

Abstract

Relative construction is one of the complex syntactic constructions involving various structures depending on the different language typologies. Studies in several languages have shown that subject relative clauses (SRCs) are easier and faster to process than object relative clauses (ORCs). Some studies have proposed the topichood hypothsis to account for the ease and faster processing of the subject relative clause. However, based on this hypothesis, when the embedded noun phrase in a relative clause is a pronoun, the difficulty in the processing of object relative clauses is reduced. In the present study, the speed of the processing Persian subject and object relative clauses with full NP and pronoun were investigated on fourtu 20–30-year-old monolingual normal subjects using self-paced reading (SPR) experiment, one of the online experiments in psycholinguistic studies. The experiment was presented in a linear, noncumulative (i.e., moving window) SPR procedure with region-by-region segmentation. Each of the 16 sentential stimuli had 4 syntactic forms and collectively, 640 reading time data from the subjects were recorded. The findings indicated that the processing speed of the regions within relative clauses, i.e., the regions containing relative clause noun phrase and relative clause verb, were faster in pronominal ORCs, pronominal SRCs, full NP SRCs and full NP ORCs, respectively. However, the processing speed of the main clause verb region was a bit different in the various sentences containing relative clauses. The conclusions, in line with the results of a number of research in other languages, confirmed the topichood hypothesis with respect to the processing of Persian relative clauses.

Keywords

• subject and object relative clauses
• topichood hypothesis
• self-paced reading
• processing speed
• persian-speaking adults