The Processing of Japanese Control Sentences

Abstract

This study investigates the processing of empty embedded clause subjects in Japanese Control sentences. In these sentences, the information necessary to specify the antecedent of the empty subject is often not available until after the embedded clause, at the Control verb. Therefore, the present study examines the following questions: (a) Is an antecedent provisionally assigned to the empty embedded clause subject in Japanese Control sentences before Control information becomes available? (b) If so, which noun phrase – the main clause subject or object – is assigned as this antecedent? The experiment consisted of a region-by-region, self-paced, non-cumulative moving-window reading task. Japanese native speakers were tested on four sentence types: (a) Subject Control sentences with empty embedded clause subjects (or SC/empty sentences), (b) Subject Control sentences with overt embedded clause subjects (or SC/overt sentences), (c) Object Control sentences with empty embedded clause subjects (or OC/empty sentences) and (d) Object Control sentences with overt embedded clause subjects (or OC/overt sentences). The reading time (RT) patterns on these sentences were consistent with an Object Control bias in the provisional assignment of an antecedent to the empty embedded clause subject. Specifically, at the Control verb, RTs were significantly longer for SC/empty sentences than for SC/overt sentences; however, there was no difference between the RTs for OC/empty and OC/overt sentences at this verb. These results suggest processing difficulty at the point of Control disambiguation only for SC/empty sentences. We interpret these findings as further support for incrementality in the parsing of Japanese sentences in general and in the processing of Japanese filler-gap structures in particular.