Abstract
It is well known that case marker information and animacy information are incrementally used to comprehend sentences in head-final languages. However, it is still unclear how these two kinds of information are processed when they are in competition in a sentence's surface expression. The current study used sentences conveying the potentiality of some event (henceforth, potential sentences) in the Japanese language with theoretically canonical word order (dative–nominative/animate–inanimate order) and with scrambled word order (nominative–dative/inanimate–animate order). In Japanese, nominative–first case order and animate–inanimate animacy order are preferred to their reversed patterns in simplex sentences. Hence, in these potential sentences, case information and animacy information are in competition. The experiment consisted of a self-paced reading task testing two conditions (that is, canonical and scrambled potential sentences). Forty-five native speakers of Japanese participated. In our results, the canonical potential sentences showed a scrambling cost at the second argument position (the nominative argument). This result indicates that the theoretically scrambled case marker order (nominative–dative) is processed as a mentally canonical case marker order, suggesting that case information is used preferentially over animacy information when the two are in competition. The implications of our findings are discussed with regard to incremental simplex sentence comprehension models for head-final languages.
Highlights
To comprehend a sentence, case processing is one of the essential linguistic processes that must be conducted [1,2,3]
It is well known that semantically reversible sentences such as the boy praised the girl are more difficult to comprehend than the corresponding non-reversible sentences such as the boy touched the table, due to the animacy information provided by the arguments
We aim to examine whether case marker information or animacy information has priority during online sentence comprehension in Japanese
Summary
Case processing is one of the essential linguistic processes that must be conducted [1,2,3]. For sentence comprehension in head-final languages, case marker processing is quite important to interpret the ‘‘who does what to whom’’ information or thematic information of a sentence [1,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. A dative-case-marked arguments will tend to be interpreted as an undergoer in transitive sentences, and as an actor in dative-subject sentences [10]. The animacy information of arguments is essential to interpret thematic information during sentence comprehension in head-final languages [3,4,9]. It is well known that semantically reversible sentences such as the boy praised the girl are more difficult to comprehend than the corresponding non-reversible sentences such as the boy touched the table, due to the animacy information provided by the arguments. It is widely assumed that this contrastive difference is caused by the greater number of possible interpretations of thematic role assignment of the subject and object in reversible sentences than of those in non-reversible sentences [9,11,12,13,14,15]
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