Pre- and post-head processing for single- and double-scrambled sentences of a head-final language as measured by the eye tracking method

Parallelism Between Sentence Structure and Nominal Phrases in Japanese: Evidence from Scrambled Instrumental and Locative Adverbial Phrases

The present study investigated the canonical position of instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in both Japanese sentences and noun phrases to determine whether the canonical positions are parallel. A series of sentence/phrase decision tasks were used to compare sentences with different word-orders, including sentences with SAdvOV (S is subject phrase, Adv adverb, O object phrase and V verb), AdvSOV, SAdvOV and SOAdvV word orders. SAdvOV word order was found to be the most quickly processed, for both instrumental adverbial (Experiment 1) and locative adverbial phrases (Experiment 2). Thus, the canonical position for these adverbial phrases is identified as the position immediately preceding the object (Theme argument). This finding was replicated when the same experimental methods were applied to event-denoting noun phrases. Adverbial adjuncts in the initial position (AdvON, N is noun phrase) were processed more quickly and accurately than noun phrases with adverbial phrases in the second position (OAdvN), for both instrumental adverbial (Experiment 3) and locative adverbial phrases (Experiment 4). Therefore, the position immediately preceding the object is the canonical position for both instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in sentences and in noun phrases. In conclusion, this indicates that the base structure of a sentence is shared by its related noun phrase.

Ambiguity in the processing of Mandarin Chinese relative clauses: One factor cannot explain it all

This study addresses the question of whether native Mandarin Chinese speakers process and comprehend subject-extracted relative clauses (SRC) more readily than object-extracted relative clauses (ORC) in Mandarin Chinese. Presently, this has been a hotly debated issue, with various studies producing contrasting results. Using two eye-tracking experiments with ambiguous and unambiguous RCs, this study shows that both ORCs and SRCs have different processing requirements depending on the locus and time course during reading. The results reveal that ORC reading was possibly facilitated by linear/temporal integration and canonicity. On the other hand, similarity-based interference made ORCs more difficult, and expectation-based processing was more prominent for unambiguous ORCs. Overall, RC processing in Mandarin should not be broken down to a single ORC (dis)advantage, but understood as multiple interdependent factors influencing whether ORCs are either more difficult or easier to parse depending on the task and context at hand.

Incremental Sentence Processing in Japanese: A Maze Investigation into Scrambled and Control Sentences

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.