Psycholinguistic Studies on Japanese Sentence Processing
Speaker: TAMAOKA, Katsuo (玉岡賀津雄)(Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University, Japan)
e-mail: ktamaoka@gc4.so-net.ne.jp, homepage: tamaoka.org/
Place: Hunan University, Changsha, China
Time and Date: 14:30 - 16:30, September 24, 2019

Backgrounds:
TAMAOKA, Katsuo is a full professor at the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University,
Japan. He has received his Ph.D. in 1990 at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada under thesupervision of professor Che Ken Leong. He is a psycholinguist whose research focuses on a wide
range of issues in language processing-from words and orthography to phrasal and sentence-level
topics. He has (co-)authored several articles in prestigious journals including Journal ofNeurolinguistics, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, PLoS ONE,and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, as well as in renowned
linguistics journals such as Language, Lingua, Linguistic Inquiry, Journal of Japanese Linguistics,and Journal of Quantitative Linguistics.
Summary of the Talk:
The talk consists of two parts. The first part discusses the role of canonical word order in a sentence
and how that order is identified in scrambling languages (Tamaoka, Sakai, Kawahara, Miyaoka, Lim& Koizumi, 2005). The second part is concerned with phrasal processing, specifically, the processingof filler-gap parsing and clause boundaries (Tamaoka & Mansbridge, 2019).
Part 1: English, whose constituent order determines the syntactic structure, other languages allow
flexible word orders. Yet, even these languages seem to use their canonical (or unmarked) word orderas the base structure for sentence processing. Scrambling, originally proposed by Ross (1967), refers
to a variety of different marked word orders derived from a canonical order. Psycholinguistic studies
on Japanese (e.g., Mazuka, Itoh & Kondo, 2002; Miyamoto & Takahashi, 2004; Tamaoka, Sakai,Kawahara, Miyaoka, Lim & Koizumi, 2005) provide evidence that sentences with scrambled orders
require longer processing times compared to equivalent sentences with canonical word order. Thissuggests that an extra cognitive load is required to process scrambled sentences. Using this concept ofscrambling, Tamaoka et al. (2005) applied this fact to determine the base order of three priority
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information cues in Japanese: thematic roles, case particles, and grammatical function. By conducting
experiments on three different types of sentences (i.e., active, passive and potential), they found thatJapanese native speakers use grammatical functions as a criterion for determining the canonical word
order in all four sentence types.

Tamaoka, K., Sakai, H., Kawahara, J.,
Miyaoka, Y., Lim, H., & Koizumi, M. (2005).
Priority information used for the processingof Japanese sentences: Thematic roles, caseparticles or grammatical functions? Journalof Psycholinguistic Research, 34(3), 281-332.

Part 2: New eye-tracking devices and techniques (the EyeLink 1000 for this talk) can measuresaccades and fixations. This has made it possible to depict the details of phrasal processing during
natural sentence reading. I, in collaboration with Michael Mansbridge, conducted two experiments
comparing a scrambled sentence with a simple transitive two-place predicate (and animate proper
noun arguments) with a corresponding canonical sentence. Experiment 1 showed that scrambled
sentences were associated with longer go-past times (showing unanticipated phrasal processing),
longer re-reading times (showing gap-filling resolution) of NP-NOM, regression-out from NP-NOM,and regression-in to NP-ACC (eye-movements from the NP-NOM just before the verb to the NP-ACC
in the sentence-initial position). Experiment 2 compared a set of three sentences with canonical, shortdistance and long-distance scrambling. The results of Experiment 2 depicted the detection of the clauseboundary at the second nominative NP (the complementizer –to in Japanese comes at the end of asubordinate sentence), gap-filling parsing in both short- and long-distance scrambling, and thescrambling gap. The details are discussed in the talk.
Tamaoka, K., & Mansbridge, M. P. (2019). An
Eye-tracking Investigation of Pre-head andHead-driven

ProcessingforScrambled

Japanese Sentences. Gengo kenkyu ( 言語研究), 155, 35-63.
Note: This talk is based on the following two papers indicated above. These papers are downloadablefrom http://tamaoka.org/scholarly/index.html#containerCover.
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