Reanalysis of clause boundaries in Japanese as a constraint-driven process.
When processing the initial segment of a sentence, readers may favor an interpretation that will turn out to be incorrect as more words are read. In these cases, a reanalysis process is necessary in order to correct the mental representation built up to that point. It has been previously proposed that readers obey a minimum change restriction, as they prefer to change the mental representation as little as possible. The present paper reports two experiments in Japanese suggesting that a minimal change restriction is unnecessary to characterize reanalysis. It is proposed instead that the present data and previous observations are more naturally explained by a constraint-driven model in which revisions are performed only when required by parsing constraints.
Miyamoto
Edson T
ET
Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Graduate School of Information Science, Ikoma, Nara, Japan. miyamoto@alum.mit.edu
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D007802:Language; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading