PMID- 22558163
OWN - NLM
STAT- MEDLINE
DCOM- 20120910
LR  - 20221207
IS  - 1932-6203 (Electronic)
IS  - 1932-6203 (Linking)
VI  - 7
IP  - 4
DP  - 2012
TI  - Processing coordinate structures in Chinese: evidence from eye movements.
PG  - e35517
LID - 10.1371/journal.pone.0035517 [doi]
LID - e35517
AB  - This article reports the results of an eye-tracking experiment that investigated 
      the processing of coordinate structures in Chinese sentence comprehension. The 
      study tracked the eye movements of native Chinese readers as they read sentences 
      consisting of two independent clauses connected by the word huo zhe. The data 
      strongly confirmed readers' preference for an initial noun phrase 
      (NP)-coordination parsing in Chinese coordination structure. When huo zhe was 
      absent from the beginning of a sentence, we identified a cost associated with 
      abandoning the NP-coordination analysis, which was evident with regard to the 
      second NP when the coordination was unambiguous. Otherwise, this cost was evident 
      with regard to the verb, the syntactically disambiguating region, when the 
      coordination was ambiguous. However, the presence of a sentence-initial huo zhe 
      reduced reading times and regressions in the huo zhe NP and the verb regions. We 
      believe that the word huo zhe at the beginning of a sentence helps the reader 
      predict that the sentence contains a parallel structure. Before the corresponding 
      phrases appear, the readers can use the word huo zhe and the language structure 
      thereafter to predicatively construct the syntactic structure. Such predictive 
      capability can eliminate the reader's preference for NP-coordination analysis. 
      Implications for top-down parsing theory and models of initial syntactic analysis 
      and reanalysis are discussed.
FAU - Qingrong, Chen
AU  - Qingrong C
AD  - Department of Psychology, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China.
FAU - Yan, Huang
AU  - Yan H
LA  - eng
PT  - Journal Article
PT  - Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
DEP - 20120425
PL  - United States
TA  - PLoS One
JT  - PloS one
JID - 101285081
SB  - IM
MH  - Asian People/psychology
MH  - Comprehension/*physiology
MH  - Eye Movements/*physiology
MH  - Humans
MH  - *Language
MH  - *Models, Theoretical
MH  - Pattern Recognition, Visual/*physiology
MH  - Psycholinguistics
MH  - *Reading
MH  - *Semantics
PMC - PMC3338849
COIS- Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
EDAT- 2012/05/05 06:00
MHDA- 2012/09/11 06:00
PMCR- 2012/04/25
CRDT- 2012/05/05 06:00
PHST- 2011/06/24 00:00 [received]
PHST- 2012/03/17 00:00 [accepted]
PHST- 2012/05/05 06:00 [entrez]
PHST- 2012/05/05 06:00 [pubmed]
PHST- 2012/09/11 06:00 [medline]
PHST- 2012/04/25 00:00 [pmc-release]
AID - PONE-D-11-11641 [pii]
AID - 10.1371/journal.pone.0035517 [doi]
PST - ppublish
SO  - PLoS One. 2012;7(4):e35517. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0035517. Epub 2012 Apr 25.