{"pk":50080,"title":"Connectives and clause order modulate Chinese pronoun resolution","subtitle":null,"abstract":"While Chinese null pronouns consistently demonstrate a subject preference, overt pronouns exhibit a subject preference in forward reference but not in backward reference. Previous studies have attributed this pattern to syntactically imposed constraints. However, Su (2020) proposed that this pattern arises from language-specific discourse constraints prohibiting subject referents for overt backward pronouns in temporal clauses but allowing them in non-temporal clauses. To examine Su's account, we administered an offline sentence judgment experiment with 100 Chinese-speaking adults. The experiment employed contextually ambiguous sentences, involving manipulations of pronoun form (null vs. overt), anaphora type (forward vs. backward) and clause/connective (deshihou ‘when', zhiqian/zhihou ‘before/after' and ruguo ‘if'). Our results partly confirmed Su's account: Chinese overt backward pronouns showed a subject preference in non-temporal ruguo ‘if' clauses and temporal zhiqian/zhihou ‘before/after' clauses, but not in temporal deshihou ‘when' clauses. These findings suggest potential influences of event structure on Chinese pronoun resolution.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Linguistics; Psychology; Language Comprehension; Quantitative Behavior"}],"section":"Abstracts with Poster Presentation (accepted as Abstracts)","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4x51n6sp","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Shuya","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chen","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Patrick","middle_name":"","last_name":"Sturt","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""},{"first_name":"Vicky","middle_name":"","last_name":"Chondrogianni","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T19:00:00+01:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/50080/galley/38042/download/"}]}