{"pk":21491,"title":"Information Locality in the Processing of Classifier-Noun Dependencies in Mandarin Chinese","subtitle":null,"abstract":"In this paper, we report three reading time (RT) experiments (one using self-paced reading and two using A-Maze) that tested the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of classifier-noun dependencies in Mandarin Chinese (MC). We leveraged prenominal relative clauses and the contrast between general and specific classifiers in MC, which offered a good testing ground for existing theories of sentence processing. Results from the A-Maze experiments showed both locality and expectation effects. More importantly, we observed an interaction between locality and expectation in the way of Information Locality (Futrell, 2019; Futrell, Gibson, & Levy, 2020): Expectation-driven facilitation was highly constrained by locality effects. To capture the results, we implemented a resource-rational Lossy-Context Surprisal model (Hahn et al., 2022) for MC, which successfully replicated the key patterns in the A-Maze experiments.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Psychology; Language understanding; Predictive Processing; Semantics; Syntax; Computational Modeling; Large Language Models"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02m220jt","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Hailin","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hao","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Southern California","department":""},{"first_name":"Yang","middle_name":"","last_name":"Yang","name_suffix":"","institution":"Guangdong University of Foreign Studies","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hahn","name_suffix":"","institution":"Saarland University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21491/galley/11090/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21491/galley/21936/download/"}]}