Expectation-based Processing: Chinese classifiers
General idea - definite or enumerated chinese nouns are preceded by classifiers that depend on the semantic class of the intended meaning of the noun (EXAMPLE). Depending on the meaning the same noun can appear with different classifiers (e.g. three teachers vs. three groups of teachers). Crucially, there also seem to be cases where producers have a choice between two classifiers for the same noun without causing a meaning difference (EXAMPLE). In at least some of these cases, one of the possible classifiers is more restrictive (e.g. WEI teacher) than the other (GE teacher) - in the sense, that the latter is compatible with more nouns than the former. As the classifiers precede the noun, we hypothesize that comprehenders can integrate the information provided by classifiers during incremental comprehension to narrow down the noun they expect. This should lead to increased processing speed for specific classifiers (WEI) compared to general classifiers (GE).