23 - The comprehension of coreference in Chinese discourse

Summary

Most psycholinguistic research on Chinese has examined processing at the level of the word. The dramatic differences between languages like English, that have orthographic writing systems, and languages like Chinese, that have ideographic writing systems, have made the study of the recognition of Chinese words a fascinating and fruitful area for understanding the cognitive mechanisms involved in a variety of aspects of lexical processing. In contrast, relatively little psycholinguistic research has systematically examined higher levels of processing, such as discourse integration, for Chinese (Cheng, 1987). While not as immediately apparent as the differences in writing systems, there do appear to be important differences at the discourse level between Chinese and English. Linguistic analyses of Chinese are divided over whether comprehension is guided principally by contextual and pragmatic information (e.g. Chu, 1998; Li & Thompson, 1981; Tsao, 1977) or instead is more responsive to the structural organization of an utterance (e.g. Huang, 1982; Aoun & Li, 1992), as has often been suggested in comprehension studies of English. Theoretical attempts in psycholinguistics to understand discourse processing have shown that referential expressions – words or phrases that refer to people, things or events – play a fundamental role in making discourse coherent, but that conclusion has been primarily based on studies of English (e.g. Garrod & Sanford, 1982; Kintsch & van Dijk, 1978; Gordon & Hendrick, 1998).