Unpacking the blocking effect: Syntactic prominence and perspective-taking in antecedent retrieval in Mandarin Chinese

In the linguistics literature, it is generally accepted that the non-local use of the bare reflexive ziji in Mandarin Chinese is sensitive to perspective centers. The introduction of a local first-person pronoun encoding the comprehender’s perspective is assumed to block non-local binding (i.e. make it unavailable), a phenomenon called the blocking effect. However, it is not yet clear whether the blocking effect is absolute, nor whether the syntactic prominence of the blocking pronoun influences the strength of blocking. In this study, we report two sets of offline and online experiments to examine the blocking effect associated with ziji. By comparing the forced choice judgment results in Experiments 1 and 2, we find that syntactically prominent subject blockers lead to stronger blocking compared to object blockers, and that the strength of the blocking effect can be modulated by verb semantics. Furthermore, only subject blockers caused blocking during incremental real-time processing while object blockers did not. The results of these experiments have implications for both the linguistic formulation of the blocking effect and for sentence processing models.