Institute of Development, Aging, and Cancer, Tohoku University, Sendai City, Miyagi prefecture, Japan.
PLoS One. 2013;8(2):e56106. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0056106. Epub 2013 Feb 8.
Recently, sentence comprehension in languages other than European languages has been investigated from a cross-linguistic perspective. In this paper, we examine whether and how animacy-related semantic information is used for real-time sentence comprehension in a SOV word order language (i.e., Japanese). Twenty-three Japanese native speakers participated in this study. They read semantically reversible and non-reversible sentences with canonical word order, and those with scrambled word order. In our results, the second argument position in reversible sentences took longer to read than that in non-reversible sentences, indicating that animacy information is used in second argument processing. In contrast, for the predicate position, there was no difference in reading times, suggesting that animacy information is NOT used in the predicate position. These results are discussed using the sentence comprehension models of an SOV word order language.
最近，人们从跨语言的角度研究了非欧洲语言的句子理解。在本文中，我们考察了在 SOV 语序语言（即日语）中，是否以及如何使用与生物性相关的语义信息进行实时句子理解。23 名日语母语者参与了这项研究。他们阅读了具有标准语序和乱序的语义可反转和不可反转的句子。在我们的结果中，可反转句子中的第二个论元位置的阅读时间长于不可反转句子，这表明生物性信息被用于第二个论元处理。相比之下，对于谓语位置，阅读时间没有差异，这表明生物性信息未被用于谓语位置。我们使用 SOV 语序语言的句子理解模型来讨论这些结果。
