The subject-relative advantage in Chinese 2 Corresponding author:

The subject-relative advantage in Chinese 3 Chinese relative clauses present an important test case for pitting the predictions of expectation-based accounts against those of memory-based theories. The memory-based accounts predict that object relatives should be easier to process than subject relatives because, in object relatives, less linguistic material intervenes between the head noun and the gap (or verb) that it associates with. By contrast, expectation-based accounts such as surprisal predict that the less frequently occurring object relative should be harder to process than the subject relative, because building a rarer structure is computationally more expensive. Previous studies on Chinese relative clause studies have the problem that local ambiguities in subject and object relatives could be confounding the comparison. We compared reading difficulty in subject and object relatives in which the left context leads the reader to predict a relative clause structure as the most likely continuation; we validate this assumption about what is predicted using production data (a sentence completion study and a corpus analysis). Two reading studies (self-pace