Subject-extracted Preference in the Processing of English (L1) Relative Clause
Huili Wang · 2025
Previous research indicates that English subject-relative clauses (SRCs) are generally easier to process than object-relative clauses (ORCs), a finding supported by many alphabetic languages. However, in Chinese, object relatives are reportedly easier to process, challenging the notion of universal subject preference. While much research exists on sentence processing in native speakers, bilingual sentence parsing remains underexplored. This study examines how bilinguals with Chinese as their first language process subject-extracted SRCs and ORCs using event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure real-time brain activity. The findings support the SRC preference, influenced by English relative clause (RC) markedness and bilinguals’ lower working memory capacity. ERP results reveal differences in brain activity linked to filler-gap dependencies but do not show significant semantic processing due to the length of the RCs.