Witzel Jeffrey, Witzel Naoko
Department of Linguistics and TESOL, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, 76019, USA.
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2016 Jun;45(3):475-505. doi: 10.1007/s10936-015-9356-4.
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.
本研究使用迷宫任务调查了日语（一种后置词语言）中的言语前结构和语义处理。测试了两种句子类型——简单的语序错乱句子（实验1）和对照句子（实验2）。实验1表明，即使对于简单的单句日语句子，（1）解析非规范词序存在在线处理成本，（2）这些成本是在将成分逐步整合到正在形成的句子表征过程中产生的。实验2表明，（1）在动词信息可用之前，日语对照句子中的先行词会被临时分配给空主语，（2）这一过程受宾语控制偏向的引导。综合来看，这些发现被解释为表明言语前分析在后置词语言中移位成分的处理以及空元素的指称属性方面发挥着重要作用。
