An Empirical Study of Psychological Processing in Comprehension of Chinese Topic Chains with Zero Anaphora

• Main Authors: Yuqin Zhung, 鍾玉琴
• Other Authors: Ovid J. Tzeng
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1993
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/58892384782854966645

碩士 === 輔仁大學 === 語言學系 === 81 === This thesis is a preliminary study exploring the sychological processing mechanism involved in the comprehension of Chinese topic chains with zero anaphora in subject positions. We investigate the developmental performance of normal children (4:0-6:0) as well as the performance of aphasic patients. Two kinds of associative memory theories (Wickelgren 1979) are proposed for interpretation. They are the horizontal association and the vertical association hypothesis. Three types of topic chains differing in number of clauses, ranging from two to four, were constructed for testing. In each trial of the comprehension task, a question about who performed the action of the last proposition in each passage was asked. Statistical results indicate that four-year-old children depend totally on the horizontal association scheme. At thef five, children began to make fewer errors on the four-pic chains, indicating the emergence of verticalround the age of six, most children have learnedation to help process Chinese topic chain From the performance of aphasic subjects, it showed that Broca' s aphasics displayed a similar error pattern as four-year- old children. Contrastively, Wernicke's aphasics showed aimilar pattern to six-year-old children. Thestudy are summarized as follows: (1) In the comprehension of Chinese topic chains with zeronaphora, the underlying psychological processes involved include vertical association. (2) Vertical association begins to developt the age five, and becomes established around six.patterns of performance in Chinese reference resolution of zero anaphora in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasias were found. This difference in psychological processing may provide useful criteria for the clinical diagnosis of these two classes of aphasias.