The Analysis of the Processing Difficulty of Relative Clauses

This article,based on a review of previous research relevant to the processing difficulty of relative clauses,argued that the following factors is not negligible with respect to their influence on the processing difficulty of RCs: 1) structural complexity of a relative clause;2) human working memory limitation;3) the important part played by the classical SVC word order in the process of sentence comprehension;4) the distribution of old and new information in a sentence. Additionally,constraining effects of the four factors may not necessarily be in the same level,or even in a competitive relationship with each other.