Abstract
Recently, sentence comprehension in languages other than European languages has been investigated from a cross-linguistic perspective. In this paper, we examine whether and how animacy-related semantic information is used for real-time sentence comprehension in a SOV word order language (i.e., Japanese). Twenty-three Japanese native speakers participated in this study. They read semantically reversible and non-reversible sentences with canonical word order, and those with scrambled word order. In our results, the second argument position in reversible sentences took longer to read than that in non-reversible sentences, indicating that animacy information is used in second argument processing. In contrast, for the predicate position, there was no difference in reading times, suggesting that animacy information is NOT used in the predicate position. These results are discussed using the sentence comprehension models of an SOV word order language.
Highlights
Sentence comprehension in languages other than European languages has been investigated from a cross-linguistic perspective
Each target sentence consisted of two arguments and a verb followed by an auxiliary verb such as souda, youda, and rashii, which represent the meaning of a guess
The purpose of the current study was to examine whether animacy information is used in real-time sentence comprehension in the Japanese language or not
Summary
Sentence comprehension in languages other than European languages has been investigated from a cross-linguistic perspective. Between English and Japanese, there are mainly two points related to sentence comprehension that differ: one is the canonical word order (English: SVO; Japanese: SOV), the other is the case marking system (English: word order; Japanese: case particles). Such differences have been assumed to reflect different processing strategies during sentence comprehension between these two languages [10,11]. To totally cover the human language processing mechanism, it is necessary to investigate the sentence comprehension mechanism in SOV languages
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