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

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Abstract

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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics and TESOL, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, 76019, USA

    Jeffrey Witzel & Naoko Witzel

  2. University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA

    Jeffrey Witzel & Naoko Witzel

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  1. Jeffrey Witzel
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  2. Naoko Witzel
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Correspondence to Jeffrey Witzel.

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This study was supported in part by a Graduate Research Grant from the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute at the University of Arizona.

Appendices

Appendix A

The sentences are presented in the following order for each item set: active/canonical, active/scrambled, passive/canonical, passive/scrambled.

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Appendix B

In each item, the overt embedded-clause subjects are presented in parentheses, and the SC and OC verbs are separated by a slash.

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Witzel, J., Witzel, N. Incremental Sentence Processing in Japanese: A Maze Investigation into Scrambled and Control Sentences. J Psycholinguist Res 45, 475–505 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-015-9356-4

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