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Interaction Between Syntactic Structure and Information Structure in the Processing of a Head-Final Language

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Abstract

The effects of syntactic and information structures on sentence processing load were investigated using two reading comprehension experiments in Japanese, a head-final SOV language. In the first experiment, we discovered the main effects of syntactic and information structures, as well as their interaction, showing that interaction of these two factors is not restricted to head-initial languages. The second experiment revealed that the interaction between syntactic structure and information structure occurs at the second NP (O of SOV and S of OSV), which, crucially, is a pre-head position, suggesting the incremental nature of the processing of both syntactic structure and information structure in head-final languages.

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Notes

  1. The following abbreviations are used in this article: ACC = accusative case; COP = copula; NOM = nominative case; GEN = genitive case; AUX = auxiliary verb; NP = noun phrase; VP = verb phrase; given = given information; new = new information; PRES = present particle; PAST = past tense; TOP = topic; FOC = focus; P = phrase; IS = information structure; SS = syntactic structure.

  2. Meng et al. (1999) reported a study on German sentence processing in which the processing difficulty for OSV embedded clauses, as compared with SOV embedded clauses, disappear with the inclusion of IS supporting context for the OS when compared to neutral context. Judging from the mean reaction times shown in the figures and other results, they seem to have found SS–IS interaction in the processing of German head-final embedded clauses. If so, their results are compatible with those of Experiment 1 of the present study. Unfortunately, as Meng et al.’s manuscript does not report statistics, it is not clear whether the observed effects are statistically significant. Furthermore, they only reported reaction times for sentence final position. Thus, their results are not informative about the time course of the interaction. In a related study with event-related potentials, Bornkessel et al. (2003) investigated effects of intersentential context on syntactic integration processing at the clause-initial NP position. They did not find SS–IS interactions there. Fedorenko and Levy (2007), as cited in Brown et al. (2008), demonstrated some independent effects of word order and IS in the self-paced reading of Russian sentences, but failed to find their interaction.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, Graduate School of Arts and Letters, Tohoku University, 27-1 Kawauchi Aoba-ku, Sendai, 980-8576, Japan

    Masatoshi Koizumi

  2. Research Centre for Japanese Language and Linguistics, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Satoshi Imamura

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  1. Masatoshi Koizumi
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  2. Satoshi Imamura
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Correspondence to Masatoshi Koizumi.

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Koizumi, M., Imamura, S. Interaction Between Syntactic Structure and Information Structure in the Processing of a Head-Final Language. J Psycholinguist Res 46, 247–260 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-016-9433-3

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