Speakers Are Interconnected With Comprehenders: The Asymmetry of Argument Order by Long-before-short Preference in Korean

Speakers Are Interconnected With Comprehenders: The Asymmetry of Argument Order by Long-before-short Preference in Korean Yun-ju Nam (supia0525@naver.com) Upyong Hong (uphong@konkuk.ac.kr) Hongoak Yun* (oaktreepark@gmail.com) Department of Media and Communication, Konkuk University, 120 Neungdong-ro, Gwangjin-gu, 143-701, Seoul, Korea Abstract 1 communicative context, few studies have attempted to investigate how speakers’ production tendency is substantially related to comprehenders’ processing difficulty by simultaneously taking into account both production and comprehension results that are conducted using the same experimental environment (e.g., using the same experimental materials). In this study, we aimed to demonstrate how closely speakers’ behaviors (e.g., production preferences) are interconnected with comprehenders’ behaviors (e.g., comprehension difficulty). For this purpose, we focus on a cross-linguistic linguistic phenomenon known as long-before-short preference observed in head-final languages like Korean and Japanese. We investigated how closely speakers’ production preferences were interconnected with comprehenders’ processing difficulty, using dative sentences in Korean, based on the behavioral data that we obtained from a production study and an eye-tracking reading study, respectively. In both studies, we tested the long-before-short preference such that long words/phrases were highly likely to be placed prior to short words/phrases (Yamashita & Chang, 2001). Both speakers and comprehenders preferred dative sentences of which target arguments (i.e., recipients and patients) were canonically ordered when the length of the arguments did not differ and when the length of recipients was longer than that of patients. However, when the length of patients was longer than that of recipients, the canonical order of arguments was not preferred. Our data indicated that speakers and comprehension observed the length constraint, although they eventually violated the canonicality constraint. The asymmetry of argument order modulated by long-before-short preference was further examined in the linear mixed-effect regression model to see the relationship between production and comprehension. The results revealed that comprehenders felt easier to process sentences as the degree of speakers’ structural preferences increased. Altogether, we present our results as evidence showing that speakers and comprehenders are closely interconnected each other, supporting the claim that the processes in production and comprehension are not dichotomy (Pickering & Garrod, 2013). Keywords: sentence comprehension, sentence production; long before short preference; head-final language Introduction A successful communication emerges as a function of cooperative coordination between speakers and comprehenders (c.f., Grice, 1975). In this vein, exploring the internal mechanism across production and comprehension is one of the topics that many studies have recently paid attention on. Many previous studies have extensively discussed comprehenders’ behaviors within the findings on speakers’ behaviors, which have been observed independently, or vice versa. However, except the studies that tested communicators’ interactive behaviors in a * Corresponding author. Department of Media and Long before short preference in head-final languages The length of words or phrases has been known as one of the constraints that have an effect on shifting the order of words or phrases in a sentence. It is of great interest that the effect of length constraint differs typologically across languages. For example, in English, short constituents are often located prior to long constituents (Arnold, Wasow, Losongco, & Ginstrom, 2000; Bresnan, Cueni, Nikitina, & Baayen, 2007). Example (2) in which a short recipient, Mary, appears before a long patient, the antique that was valuable, is preferred to Example (1) in which the short recipient is located after the long patient. The short-before- long preference was consistent to the claim of the accessibility theory (Bock & Levelt, 1994) indicating that short words are more accessible than long words which in turn more accessible words tend to occur before less accessible words. (1) I gave [the antique that was valuable] [to Mary]. (2) I gave [Mary] [the antique that was valuable]. On the contrary, in Japanese, long words or phrases are likely to be placed before short ones. Using dative sentences (Experiment 2), Yamashita and Chang (2001) demonstrated that Japanese speakers were more likely to produce sentences like (3) in which long patients are located before short recipients than sentences like (4) in which short recipients are located before long patients. Such a long- before-short preference challenged to the accessibility