Reduced Relative Clause - Use in Psycholinguistic Research

Use in Psycholinguistic Research

Across languages, reduced relative clauses often give rise to temporary ambiguity (garden path effects), since the first word of a reduced clause may initially be interpreted as part of the main clause. Therefore, reduced relative clauses have been the subject of "an enormous number of experiments" in psycholinguistics, especially for investigating whether semantic information or information from the context can affect how a reader or listener initially parses a sentence. For example, one study compared sentences in which the garden path effect was more likely because the reduced relative verb was one that was likely to be used as a main verb for its subject (as in "the defendant examined...", where the subject "defendant" is animate and could be the do-er of the action) and sentences in which the garden path effect was less likely (as in "the evidence examined...", where the subject "evidence" is not animate and thus could not be doing the examining). Reduced relative clauses have also been used in studies of second-language acquisition, to compare how native speakers handled reduced relatives and how non-native speakers handle them.

In languages with head-final relative clauses, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Turkish, non-reduced relative clauses may also cause temporary ambiguity because the complementizer does not precede the relative clause (and thus a person reading or hearing the relative clause has no "warning" that they are in a relative clause).