title: Incremental Sentence Processing in Japanese: A Maze Investigation into Scrambled and Control Sentences.
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.
authors: Department of Linguistics and TESOL, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, 76019, USA. jeffrey.witzel@uta.edu.|University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA. jeffrey.witzel@uta.edu.
authors: Jeffrey
authors: J
authors: Witzel
authors: Department of Linguistics and TESOL, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, 76019, USA.|University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
authors: Naoko
authors: N
authors: Witzel
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading
keywords: Control; Japanese; Maze task; Preverbal processing; Scrambling