Frequency issues of classifier configurations for processing Mandarin object-extracted relative clauses: A corpus study

Abstract

Psycholinguistic studies on whether classifiers facilitate processing object-extracted relative clauses (RC) in Mandarin have often made use of a classifier mismatch-match configuration, wherein a preceding classifier mismatches the following RC-subject but matches the modified head noun. However, an examination of the Chinese Treebank corpus 5.0 shows this configuration rarely occurs. None of the 10 tokens of pre-RC classifiers conforms to the mismatch-match configuration in a real sense. Instead, either a dropped RC-subject or some intervening item successfully avoids anticipated lexical disruption effects induced by a mismatching classifier. The results of analysis suggest that the constructed examples used in previous psycholinguistic studies may not realistically test natural language processing procedures.