ERIC Number: EJ1098516
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2016-Jun
Pages: 31
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0090-6905
EISSN: N/A
Incremental Sentence Processing in Japanese: A Maze Investigation into Scrambled and Control Sentences
Witzel, Jeffrey; Witzel, Naoko
Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, v45 n3 p475-505 Jun 2016
This study investigates preverbal structural and semantic processing in Japanese, a head-final language, using the maze task. Two sentence types were tested--simple scrambled sentences (Experiment 1) and control sentences (Experiment 2). Experiment 1 showed that even for simple, mono-clausal Japanese sentences, (1) there are online processing costs associated with parsing noncanonical word orders and (2) these costs are incurred during the incremental integration of constituents into developing sentence representations. Experiment 2 indicated (1) that antecedents are provisionally assigned to empty subjects in Japanese control sentences before verb information becomes available and (2) that this process is guided by an object control bias. Taken together, these findings are interpreted to suggest an important role for preverbal analysis in the processing of displaced constituents and of referential properties for empty elements in head-final languages.
Descriptors: Japanese, Language Processing, Sentence Structure, Verbs, Cloze Procedure, Reading Tests, Semantics, Word Order, Bias, Experiments
Springer. 233 Spring Street, New York, NY 10013. Tel: 800-777-4643; Tel: 212-460-1500; Fax: 212-348-4505; e-mail: service-ny@springer.com; Web site: http://www.springerlink.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A