| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中正大學 === 語言學研究所 === 107 === Based on the discourse structure, three principles (pragmatics, subject prominence, and adjacency) can be identified for the zero anaphora (ZA) resolution in terms of the role played by pragmatics, semantics, and syntax in describing by sentences/clauses are pragmatically related. Although many studies focus on the ZA in Mandarin Chinese, few studies pay attention to the ZA in Taiwan Southern Min (henceforth TSM), let alone the relation between comprehension and aging. Therefore, this study aims to investigate age differences in ZA comprehension in TSM. In this study, the three principles which identify an appropriate antecedent to ZA in Mandarin Chinese are applied in TSM. Since both comprehension and aging involve working memory capacity, a listening span test was conducted in all experiments to observe its effects.
Another goal of this study is to test whether the pragmatic cues interact with the syntactic structure of ZA, since previous studies have suggested that pragmatics are related to the comprehension and WM capacity, especially for older adults. From the syntactic perspective, the ZA is more likely to occur in both sentence and discourse levels when the two coreferential NPs are both in the subject positions. In addition, the sentences containing the perception verbs will make ZAs easily refer to the object antecedents. From the semantic perspective, the ZAs in the sentences containing the perception verbs can either refer to a subject or an object antecedent, depending on the meanings of particular cues. It is questionable whether the pragmatic cues do help people locate the antecedent in the sentences/discourses containing the perception verbs. Discourses with/without pragmatic cues were examined in this study to make a comparison.
Experiment 1 and 2 had the same basic design. Experiment 1 replicates Wu et al. (2016) using TSM version, while Experiment 2 revises the weak parts of the method and materials. In Experiment 1 and 2, three types of discourses, each in accordance with one of the three principles, were examined to manifest the age differences. The results showed that the age differences in both accuracy rates and reaction times in Experiment 1 but age only affected reaction times in Experiment 2. The findings in Experiment 1 were support of Wu et al. (2016)'s claim whereas the ones in Experiment 2 did not. Since it is known that pragmatic cues play a vital role in comprehension, as suggested by the results in Experiment 1 and 2, Experiment 3 examined the discourses with/without pragmatic cues to test whether they could override syntactic cues when resolving ZA. The results showed that the discourses with pragmatic cues were consistent with the ones without pragmatic cues, suggesting that the syntactic cues could not be overrridden.
It is fair to conclude that in the study, the three principles of ZA comprehension give a new insight into the ZA recovery process in TSM. The test of whether pragmatic cues could override the syntactic cues to ZA resolution help us observe the default on syntactic/semantic intuition of processing the ZA comprehension more clearly. Moreover, the age differences observed in the experiments reveal a striking piece of the puzzle of aging comprehension.
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