Part of
Topics in Theoretical Asian Linguistics: Studies in honor of John B. WhitmanEdited by Kunio Nishiyama, Hideki Kishimoto and Edith Aldridge
[Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 250] 2018
► pp. 253–284
This paper presents a word-by-word computational model of incremental processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. In particular, it discusses the processing of Chinese relative clauses guided by both structural preferences and frequencies of non-structural features like animacy. The information-theoretic metric Entropy Reduction (Hale, 2003, 2006) mirrors the disambiguation effort which readers spend on each word and links theories of parsing to observed measurements in reading experiments, including the so-called animacy effect in psycholinguistic studies (Wu, Kaiser & Anderson 2012).