A dependency-based analysis of the cognitive load of Chinese contracted sentences: evidence from annotated corpora

Abstract Chinese contracted sentences are often viewed as a strategy to enhance processing efficiency, yet quantitative evidence for their syntactic and cognitive features remains limited. This study examines whether their dependency distance distributions (DDDs) follow Zipfian regularities and whether their mean dependency distances (MDDs) reflect reduced cognitive load. Using dependency grammar, three corpora of contracted sentences (parallel, causal, adversative) and a reference corpus were annotated for dependency syntax. Results show that (i) the DDDs of both contracted and reference sentences follow Zipf’s law, supporting the principle of dependency distance minimization; and (ii) contracted sentences exhibit significantly shorter MDDs, suggesting lower cognitive load. Comparison with full-form counterparts further confirms that contraction reduces syntactic complexity and processing effort. These findings provide quantitative evidence that Chinese contracted sentences conform to universal dependency distance patterns while optimizing cognitive efficiency.