earticle

영어

Two self-paced reading experiments investigated the factors that influence the processing difficulty in relative clauses. Korean learners proficient in English participated in the experiments and the semantic factor and the locality factor were manipulated in the materials. The first experiment showed that there was no difference of the processing difficulty between object relative clauses and subject relative clauses with plausible sentential subjects. The second experiment showed that the processing difficulty of object relative clauses was greatly decreased when the sentential subject was inanimate. Additionally, it is noteworthy that the comprehension accuracy of subject relative clauses is lower than object relative clauses'. These results suggest that both of the semantic factor and working memory influence the processing and comprehension in relative clauses.