Processing covert dependencies: an SAT study on Mandarin wh-in-situ questions

作者：Xiang Ming^*; Dillon Brian; Wagers Matt; Liu Fengqin; Guo Taomei

来源：Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 2014, 23(2): 207-232.

DOI：10.1007/s10831-013-9115-1

• Wh-in-situ
• Chinese
• Long distance dependencies
• Covert dependencies
• Memory mechanisms
• Processing complexity

In wh-in-situ languages like Mandarin Chinese, in which the wh-phrase remains in a canonical argument position in wh-questions, syntactic theories generally posit that a covert dependency between the in-situ position and a clause-initial syntactic operator must nonetheless hold at logical form. Wh-in-situ languages and wh-fronted languages are in this way abstractly similar. This paper investigates whether the processing of Mandarin wh-in-situ questions indeed involves constructing a long-distance dependency. Using the multiple-response speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) paradigm, we show that Chinese wh-in-situ questions incur more processing costs than their non-wh counterparts. Furthermore, the length of the covert dependency affects only processing accuracy, but not processing speed. This pattern suggests a content-addressable memory process underlying the construction of wh-in-situ dependencies, similar to overt long distance dependencies in English.

• 出版日期2014-5
• 单位北京师范大学