Elaine Lau
I have always been fascinated with the complexities of the human mind, had a great love for languages, and enjoyed having fun with children. That is why I became a psycholinguist, exploring how the human mind represents and processes linguistic information, and how the amazing little minds of young children develop their language(s) and cognition.
I have mainly looked at the Cantonese relative clauses in this project, a language which has a typologically peculiar relative clause construction: VO word order X prenominal relative clause construction.
This project examines the effects of syntactic and semantic factors, such as grammatical relations and NP animacy, on the underlying mechanisms of child and adult relative clause processing, including both comprehension and production.
WHAT HAVE I FOUND?
Unlike the vast majority of studies that compared subject and object relative clauses, a pairwise comparison of the argument positions on the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (subject, direct object, indirect object and oblique) revealed a subject relative clause preference in the acquisition of Cantonese relative clauses, aligning Cantonese with other languages in this respect. The acquisition pattern suggests that children rely on multiple factors, such as subject prominence, canonical word order and animacy expectations.
Our recent review on the works on RC acquisition and RC processing also suggested a universal tendency across world's languages for a subject relative clause preference, no matter in child language or adult processing, comprehension or production.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE?
-
Universal Subject Preference Hypothesis
By examining languages with different typological configurations of their relative clause constructions (e.g. variations in word order, ergativity, relative clause position, etc.). If you know a language that has a different relative clause configuration, it will allow comparisons that have not been possible in languages like English, hence teasing apart the predictions from the confounding theories in the existing literature.
-
Down the NPAH
As mentioned above, the vast majority of the relative clause study concerns the subject-object asymmetry, the acquisition/processing of the lower positions such as oblique and genitive relative clauses has virtually never been explored in the literature (except some pioneers such as Diessel & Tomasello, 2005; Kim & O’Grady, 2016).
Ever wonder about the lower end of the hierarchy? Our methodology on the pairwise comparisons made possible the comparisons of all the argument positions on the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie, 1977). But there are still lots of room for development.
In collaboration with Dr Theres Grüter and Wenyi Ling
This study investigated the use of morphosyntactic and semantic information encoded in the linguistic signal, such as classifiers in Mandarin Chinese, during online anticipatory language processing.
WHAT HAVE WE FOUND?
Both native and non-native speakers of Mandarin Chinese make use of the noun class information at the classifier to predict the upcoming noun during online comprehension, and are able to identify the target referent prior to the noun. This study demonstrates that language users will exploit information they have already received and processed and make active predictions of the incoming message that follows. L2 learners, although not as efficient as native speakers, demonstrate similar anticipatory ability, and seem to be more adept in exploiting cues that are semantically informative, such as classifiers.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE?
-
Morphosyntactic vs. Semantic cues
Previous studies have found that arbitrarily linked syntactic cues, such as, gender-marked articles in Spanish, hardly have any facilitation effect for L2 speakers. Further studies need to be done to figure out the strength of different types of cues for L2 speakers in anticipatory processing.
-
What about children?
As always, we are interested in how different modes of learning impact on human online information processing.
Will children show a similar processing pattern with L1 adults or second language learner adults? What would that tell us about child language development?
Passive voice has been said to be a late acquired item in child syntactic development; children seem to have certain degree of difficulty with the passives before age 5. The difficulty has been attributed to factors such as syntactic complexity, exposure, cue reliability, etc.
WHAT HAVE I FOUND?
Cantonese children show early mastery of passive voice as young as age 3, while Mandarin children pattern alike their English counterparts, showing a late acquisition of the passives - often misinterpreting passive sentences as actives even at age 5. I attribute the early acquisition of Cantonese passives to the combined effect of the specific constituent configuration in Cantonese passive construction and the requirement of the obligatory presence of the oblique agent, which gives a clear and reliable indication of the passive voice construction for children.
WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE?
-
Bei 被 /Jiao 叫 /Rang 讓 /Gei 給 passives in Mandarin
There are in fact three other types of passives in Mandarin in addition to the commonly known bei passives. Two of them, Jiao and rang passives actually share the same requirement as Cantonese passives for an obligatory agent. Will these types of passives be relatively easier to acquire than the other two types with variation between long/short passives?
-
Languages with the obligatory agent requirement
Only with further investigation into languages which share the same requirement on the presence of the agent will our claim be tested. This would also allow us to explore what other factors are underlying child acquisition of passives - why in some languages, passives appear to be so difficult, whereas in some languages they seem to be relatively easy.
Unlike English, long distance binding is possible for Chinese reflexives. Examining how speakers resolved anaphor references incrementally at real-time language processing and what kind of hypotheses do different groups of speakers (native speakers, children and L2 learners) entertain at different stages of the resolution will provide an opportunity to identify the interplay between different processing factors and the grammar.
This project extends beyond the realm of syntax into prosody. It mainly examines the relation between prosody and syntax in Chinese languages. I am interested in looking at whether speakers of Chinese (adults and children) will make use of prosody to
(i) illustrate the intended syntactic structure of the construction, and (ii) to disambiguate syntactic ambiguities.
WHAT HAVE I FOUND?
There is a surface isomorphism between object relative clauses and main clauses in Cantonese, and I examined if Cantonese speakers manipulate different prosodic patterns to illustrate the structural differences between the two syntactic constructions.
Although the first run of the study suggests that Cantonese speakers do not employ prosody in the disambiguation, as observed in previous literature, there is some reason to doubt this. The next step might be trying with a more interactive paradigm and moving on to examine whether prosody is otherwise a useful cue in comprehension.