Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper, we report three reading time (RT) experiments (one using self-paced reading and two using A-Maze) that tested the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of classifier-noun dependencies in Mandarin Chinese (MC). We leveraged prenominal relative clauses and the contrast between general and specific classifiers in MC, which offered a good testing ground for existing theories of sentence processing. Results from the A-Maze experiments showed both locality and expectation effects. More importantly, we observed an interaction between locality and expectation in the way of Information Locality (Futrell, 2019; Futrell, Gibson, & Levy, 2020): Expectation-driven facilitation was highly constrained by locality effects. To capture the results, we implemented a resource-rational Lossy-Context Surprisal model (Hahn et al., 2022) for MC, which successfully replicated the key patterns in the A-Maze experiments.