Previous research reported that in processing structurally ambiguous sentences comprehenders often preserve an initial incorrect analysis even after adopting a correct analysis following structural disambiguation. One criticism is that the sentences tested in previous studies involved referential ambiguity and allowed comprehenders to make…

Research on agrammatism has revealed that the nature of linguistic impairment is systematic and interpretable. Non-canonical sentences are more impaired than those of canonical sentences. Previous studies on Japanese (Hiroshi et al. 2004; Chujo 1983; Tamaoka et al. 2003; Nakayama 1995) report that aphasic patients take longer Response Time (RT)…

Languages differ in how they encode causal events, placing greater or lesser emphasis on the agent or patient of the action. Little is known about how these preferences emerge and the relative influence of cognitive biases and language-specific input at different stages in development. In these studies, we investigated the emergence of sentence…

Two experiments using a sentence recall task tested the effect of animacy on syntactic processing in Japanese sentence production. Experiment 1 and 2 showed that when Japanese native speakers recalled transitive sentences, they were more likely to assign animate entities earlier positions in the sentence than inanimate entities. In addition,…

IN A PREVIOUS PAPER (PRESENTED AT THE TWELFTH ANNUAL NATIONAL CONFERENCE ON LINGUISTICS) THE AUTHOR POINTED OUT (1) THE RATIO OF SENTENCES WITH SUBJECTS TO SUBJECTLESS SENTENCES IN ENGLISH IS TWO TO ONE, WHEREAS IN JAPANESE IT IS ONE TO FOUR. (2) IF THE ENGLISH MAJOR SENTENCE TYPE CAN BE SAID TO CONSIST OF SUBJECT AND PREDICATE, THE JAPANESE MAJOR…