PMID- 18323073
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20080408
LR  - 20211020
IS  - 0090-502X (Print)
IS  - 0090-502X (Linking)
VI  - 36
IP  - 1
DP  - 2008 Jan
TI  - Discourse structure and relative clause processing.
PG  - 170-81
AB  - Studies in several languages have shown that subject-relative clauses are easier 
      to process than object-relative clauses. Mak, Vonk, and Schriefers (2006) have 
      proposed the topichood hypothesis to account for the preference for 
      subject-relative clauses. This hypothesis claims that the entity in the relative 
      clause that is most topicworthy will be chosen as the subject. By default, the 
      antecedent of the relative clause will be chosen as the subject of the relative 
      clause, because it is the topic of the relative clause. However, when the noun 
      phrase (NP) in the relative clause is also topicworthy, the preference for the 
      antecedent to be the subject will disappear. This was confirmed in two 
      experiments. In Experiment 1, we tested relative clauses with a personal pronoun 
      in the relative clause. We obtained a preference for object-relative clauses, in 
      line with the assumption that personal pronouns refer to a discourse topic and 
      are thus topicworthy. In Experiment 2, the discourse status of the NP in the 
      relative clause was manipulated; either it was not present in the preceding 
      context, or it was the discourse topic. The experiment showed that when the NP in 
      the relative clause refers to the discourse topic, the difficulty of 
      object-relative clauses is reduced, in comparison with relative clauses with an 
      NP that is new in the discourse, even in the absence of any explicit cue in the 
      relative clause itself. The experiments show that discourse factors guide 
      processing at the sentence level.
FAU - Mak, Willem M
AU  - Mak WM
AD  - University of Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. pim.mak@let.uu.nl
FAU - Vonk, Wietski
AU  - Vonk W
FAU - Schriefers, Herbert
AU  - Schriefers H
LA  - eng
PT  - Journal Article
PL  - United States
TA  - Mem Cognit
JT  - Memory & cognition
JID - 0357443
SB  - IM
MH  - *Cognition
MH  - *Communication
MH  - Humans
MH  - Reading
MH  - *Semantics
MH  - *Speech Perception
MH  - Time Factors
EDAT- 2008/03/08 09:00
MHDA- 2008/04/09 09:00
CRDT- 2008/03/08 09:00
PHST- 2008/03/08 09:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2008/04/09 09:00 [medline]
PHST- 2008/03/08 09:00 [entrez]
AID - 10.3758/mc.36.1.170 [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO  - Mem Cognit. 2008 Jan;36(1):170-81. doi: 10.3758/mc.36.1.170.