Unimmediate construction of syntactic structure for garden path sentences in Japanese

Abstract

While self-paced reading and eye-fixation have been used as on-line measures of sentence processing, they provide only indirect evidence as to the exact syntactic state during sentence processing. Two experiments were designed to fill this gap, where garden path sentences in Japanese were used and the marker demanding reanalysis of a previously established syntactic structure appeared at the end of these sentences. Forty-eight students were given a probe verb from an embedded clause and required to quickly identify the subject whose syntactic role could be confirmed only when they later encountered the marker. Findings showed that correct identification was below 50% immediately after the marker (0-sec delay) and increased gradually, reaching 82% at the delay of 4 sec. However, perfect identification was not obtained even for the latter delay condition. The findings indicate that parsers cannot immediately reconstruct the previous syntactic structure but need a certain period of time to reach a final decision. They also suggest that a distinction should be clarified between the moment-to-moment syntactic computation being made and the syntatic structure being constructed during sentence processing.