Production predicts comprehension: Animacy effects in Mandarin relative clause processing

• We study Mandarin speakers’ production and comprehension of relative clauses.
• Measures: production, corpus patterns, sentence completions, and self-paced reading.
• Head noun animacy predicts structure choice in relative clause production.
• Production patterns and sentence completions predict reading times.
• These results support experience-based accounts of language comprehension.

This article investigates the relationship between production and comprehension of relative clauses in Mandarin Chinese. In a picture description task, we find strong head noun animacy effects on relative clause production despite the fact that Mandarin has head-final relative clauses ([[relative clause] head noun]), so that the animate/inanimate head noun is uttered late. These and other production results have implications for theories of incremental language planning. We then used corpus analyses to investigate the distribution of structure–message pairings in the language that result from these animacy-based production biases. Mandarin is particularly interesting from the language comprehension side, as there is an extensive literature on relative clause comprehension, with conflicting results. A gated sentence completion task reveals comprehenders’ animacy-linked expectations in relative clause interpretation and also shows the substantial amount of syntactic ambiguity in Mandarin relative clauses, owing to their head-final structure. The completion data were reliable predictors of comprehenders’ self-paced reading times, but the distance between syntactically-dependent elements in the sentences was not. We argue that these results argue against accounts of sentence comprehension that posit that some sentence types are inherently more difficult than others. Instead we suggest that sentence types with which comprehenders have little experience are difficult, and we link the results ultimately to producers’ different production choices in different animacy configurations and consequent variation in language patterns that comprehenders experience.