A Cross-Cultural Study on the Interpretation of Picture-Based Sentences

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to clarify how Japanese and English speakers interpret picture-based sentences. Two studies were conducted, one with adults and one with children. The main task is to interpret eight picture-based sentences in two word-order conditions, SVO and SOV. These two conditions reflect the natural word orders of Japanese and English, respectively. The results suggest that word order was a more important cue for native English speakers than for native Japanese speakers in interpreting picture-based sentences. English speakers had more difficulty with picture symbols arrayed in SOV order than SVO. Japanese speakers had the most difficulty with missing syntactic particles in both word orders; successful interpretation sometimes depended on the particular meaning of the nouns and verbs in the sentences. This may be because English word order is more fixed, while Japanese word order has greater variance and capitalizes on syntax markers to clarify the meaning of a sentence.