This study investigates the production and comprehension of subject relative clause (SRC) and object relative clause (ORC) in English by Chinese EFL learners through two experiments. Experiment 1, using a sentence completion task, showed SRCs were more frequent than ORCs, influenced by animacy and verb type. Experiment 2, using a self-paced reading paradigm, confirmed reading difficulties in ORCs, mirroring the distributional patterns from Experiment 1. The findings support the Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC) account, highlighting the role of distributional regularities in comprehension difficulties.
Publisher
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications
Published On
Apr 15, 2023
Authors
Li Sun, Lin Fan, Mengling Xu
Tags
subject relative clauses
object relative clauses
Chinese EFL learners
comprehension difficulties
sentence structure
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