山形大学人文社会科学部研究年報第15号（2018．３）105－116

Book Review

Handbook of Japanese Psycholinguistics(Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics, v. 9)
Ed. by Mineharu Nakayama, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin,
2015, xlii+635pp.*

Yukiko KOIZUMI
1．Introduction
How do we acquire knowledge of language and how do we comprehend and produce language?
The collection of papers in the Handbook under the present review seeks to answer these questions in therelatively young but fast growing field of Japanese psycholinguistics. Edited by Mineharu Nakayama, thisHandbook, part 9 in the series of Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics co-edited by Masayoshi
Shibatani and Taro Kageyama, concerns acquisition and “processing” of Japanese as a first language (L1)and a second language (L2), where “processing” involves both comprehension and production. The topics
discussed include, but are not limited to, phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, prosody, discourse,
language impairment, electromagnetic brain response, learning models, L1 influence, and the complex
interplay among these factors.
In the early years of psycholinguistic research, much attention was paid to investigations on headinitial languages such as English and other European languages. However, as the field has progressed insearch of the universal mechanisms of language acquisition and processing, the importance of empirical datafrom non-European languages has come to be recognized more widely. Japanese is one of the most wellstudied of these languages. One characteristic advantage of studying Japanese comes from its head-final
status and word order variations. Consider a typical SOV sentence in (1).
(1) Hanako ga

Taro ohometa.

Hanako Nom Taro Acc praise-Pst‘Hanako praised Taro.’
In fact, even though the sentence appears to be simple, it is temporarily ambiguous: the sentence could
continue as one with a bi-clause structure, such as (2).
(2) Hanako ga

Taro ohometasensei ni

atta.

Hanako Nom Taro Acc praise-Pst teacher Dat meet-Pst‘Hanako met the teacher who praised Taro.’
When processing online, does the parser start working immediately after the start of the sentence, or does
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it wait until the end? The head-final status of Japanese has provided a good testing ground for theories ofincremental processing.
Also, famously, Japanese, as well as many other head-final languages, is relatively flexible in terms ofword orders. The scrambled OSV version of (1) is given below.
(3) Taro o

Hanako ga

hometa.

Taro Acc Hanako Nom praise-Pst‘Hanako praised Taro.’
Scrambling can be used to manipulate word orders, but this phenomenon itself is also interesting. As
discussed in Chapter 13, many studies find that the non-canonical (scrambled) order is harder to process
than the canonical order, and exploring the nature of this processing difficulty allows for investigation on awide range of interacting factors in sentence comprehension (e.g. Case markers, thematic roles, information
structure, and prosody) in the way that would not be possible in English and other head-initial languages.
Readers of this Handbook can familiarize themselves with important research questions, state-of-the-art
experimental methodologies and insightful findings in the various subfields of psycholinguistics. The bookwill not only inform experienced researchers of recent theoretical and methodological advances in Japanese
psycholinguistics, but also appeal to those looking to extend their work to the Japanese language. It will also
be helpful for those in theoretical linguistics who are developing an interest in empirical research.
It is clearly not possible to sufficiently discuss all of the studies in this extensive Handbook within thelimited space accorded to the present review. For this reason, I will examine some studies in more detailthan others, as I believe they effectively demonstrate how studying Japanese acquisition and processing canoffer important insights for the field of psycholinguistics. In the next section, I will introduce Part I, on theacquisition of Japanese. The section that follows offers highlights of Part II, on the processing of Japanese.
The final section concludes this review by reminding readers of the importance of this collection of papers
to the field of linguistics and psycholinguistics.

2．Acquisition of JapanesePart I of the Handbook, on the acquisition of Japanese, contains 10 papers on language development,
focusing on L1 and L2 acquisition of Japanese in children, adults and people with language impairment.
2.1. L1 Acquisition of Japanese
The topics discussed in the studies on L1 acquisition of Japanese cover a broad range, including
phonological development (Chapter 1), acquisition of semantic concepts such as count/mass distinction(Chapter 2), acquisition by children with Specific Language Impairment (Chapter 3), development of Root－111 －

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Infinitive (RI) analogues (Chapter 4), and narrative development from a sociolinguistic perspective (Chapter
6).
In this section, I will introduce Takuya Goro’s paper (Chapter 5) in more detail, as it illustrates well how
findings from languages like Japanese can make an interesting contribution to the exploration of the universal
mechanism of language acquisition. Goro discusses the acquisition of scope relations from the perspectivesof learnability theory. When the three components of the language acquisition process (productivity of thelearner, unavailability of negative evidence, and arbitrariness of constraints) are all present, a learnability
paradox will occur (cf. Pinker (1989)). What this means is that, without negative evidence, it is impossible
for a learner to be fully productive and still be able to learn arbitrary constraints at the same time. In thecase of scope acquisition, because there is very limited, if any, availability of negative evidence, if we wantto prevent the occurrence of a learnability paradox, it must be the case that either learners are unproductive(denial of productivity) or rules are not arbitrary (denial of arbitrariness). Findings from languages such
as Japanese, which exhibits different linear word orders from languages like English, better reveal aspectsof scope acquisition and present interesting case studies. With complex scope relations, either one of two
acquisition processes is possible. Children could start from experiencing ‘freedom of scope (productivity)’
with a wider range of acceptable scope relations, and then narrow down to those scope relations which are
actually present in the adult grammar; or they could start as ‘conservative learners (arbitrariness)’ with thesmallest possible subsets of arbitrary rules and then gradually come to accommodate more possibilities as
they receive more adult language input.
Goro then reviewed his research projects that examined these two logical possibilities by investigating
on two types of scope phenomena in Japanese. One involved quantifier scope interaction in scrambled
sentences.
(4) Taroo-dake-ga

huransugo-mo supeingo-mo hanasu.

Taro-only-Nom French-also

Spanish-also speak‘Only Taro speaks both French and Spanish.’(5) Huransugo-mo
French-alsosupeingo-moi Taroo-dake-ga ti hanasu.
Spanish-also Taro-only-Nom

speak

Lit. ‘Both French and Spanish, only Taro speaks.’
(Nakayama et al. (2015: 235-236))

In the canonical ordering of (4), the sentence describes a situation where Taro speaks both French andSpanish, and no one else speaks both: it is thus possible someone exists who speaks either of them. The
conjuction falls under the scope of dake ‘only’ in this “normal” scope relation. However, the scrambled
version of (5) is different: this sentence describes a situation where Taro is the only person who speaks
French or Spanish, with no one else speaking either of them. The conjunction takes a wider scope than dake－111 －

Handbook of Japanese Psycholinguistics (Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics, v. 9)Ed. by Mineharu Nakayama, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin,2015, xlii+635pp.――KOIZUMI‘only’ here (the “inverse” scope relation). In his truth-value judgement experiment on this type of quantifierscope interaction, in a situation where dake ‘only’ takes the widest scope, whereas adults mostly rejected ascrambled sentence such as (5) children were more lenient about rejecting such inverse scope readings. This
indicates that children are more productive and accept freer scope relations than adults. Goro concluded
that, in this case, children start off with freer scope readings and narrow down their grammar in the courseof their development.
Curiously, however, Goro’s findings on his other study, involving the scope of the logical connectives-ka ‘or’ and -mo ‘and’ in negative sentences, indicated the opposite learning process.
(6) Butasan-wa
pig-Topninzin ka piman-otabe-nakat-ta.

carrot or pepper-Acc eat-Neg-Pst

Lit. ‘The pig didn’t eat the carrot or the pepper.’(7) Butasan-wa
pig-Topninzin-mo piman-motabe-nakat-ta.

carrot-also pepper-also eat-Neg-Pst

Lit. ‘The pig didn’t eat both the carrot and the pepper.’

(Nakayama et al. (2015: 248))

In a truth-value judgment task, in a situation where the pig had eaten the carrot but not the green pepper, (6) is
consistently acceptable and (7) is not, for adults. However, the children’s data showed a strikingly different
pattern than adults, accepting (6) only 25% of the time. These results indicate that, for processing this typeof scope relation, children are more conservative than adults and only accept scope relations that would
yield subset truth-conditions. The implication here is that language may have arbitrary language-specificscope constraints that cannot be acquired by productivity. These findings taken together, Goro concludes
that scope acquisition cannot be explained in terms of a single general learning mechanism. It does not seemthat children singlehandedly and successfully extend one learning strategy to other cases of scope relations,and more research is needed in order to better understand the nature of learning strategies and constraints onlearning principles.
Scope phenomena are known to vary across languages and are some of the most interesting research
topics in theoretical linguistics. Goro bases his characterization of this complex phenomena on solid
theoretical syntactic and semantic considerations of the scope ambiguity, and lays out a well thought out
discussion and the theoretical implications of his findings on children’s scope processing from learnability
perspectives. The contrasting experimental findings from the two studies concretely demonstrate howcomplex scope processing in young children can be and how studying the acquisition of Japanese canprovide important insights into the theory of universal language acquisition mechanisms.

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2.2. Japanese in the L2 Acquisition
As pointed out in Shirai’s overview paper (Chapter 7) on Japanese psycholinguistic research in thefield of second language acquisition (SLA), psycholinguistic approaches in SLA research are advancing
rapidly. As shown in Chapter 8, many factors may affect the acquisition of a second language and how
early or late each of the grammatical components of a second language can be acquired varies. Studies fromneuroscientific perspectives have also been published rapidly in recent years, as introduced in Chapter 10,
allowing us to know more on the time course and types of brain response to certain properties of perceived
language strings. Although there are many other important points in these papers, in this subsection I would
like to introduce more details of Chapter 9, Gabriele and Sugita-Hughes’ paper on the L2 acquisition ofJapanese tense and aspect.
Gabriele and Sugita-Hughes’ paper discusses the L2 acquisition of Japanese tense and aspect (asobserved in the ‘-ta’ and ‘-teiru’ distinction), particularly in light of the Aspect Hypothesis (cf. Andersen
and Shirai 1996, Sugaya and Shirai 2007). The Aspect Hypothesis in second language acquisition predicts
that learners are limited with respect to their use of temporal and aspectual grammatical forms and, more
specifically, predicts that the order of acquisition of tense and aspectual information encoding depends on thesemantic type of the verb (for example, achievement verbs such as tuku ‘arrive’ and accomplishment verbs
such as kaku ‘write’). With this in mind, they reviewed a few of their research studies that investigated theinfluence of learners’ L1 in the acquisition of Japanese tense and aspect. In one study (Gabriele 2009), a
perception experiment was conducted on English-speaking L2 learners of Japanese. In a Story Compatibility
judgment task, participants were presented with test sentences of achievement verbs and accomplishment
verbs. Each verb was paired with simple past tense and -teiru aspectual markers. An example pair with theachievement verb tuku ‘arrive’ is given below.
(8) Simple Past: Hikooki-wa kuukoo niplane-Toptukimasita.

airport-Loc arrived-Pol(9) Te-iru: Hikooki wa kuukoo ni tui-te-imasu.
plane-Top airport-Loc arrive-teiru-Pol(Nakayama ed. (2015: 376))
Each of the test sentences was presented after a story that either depicted the completion or incompletionof the event, and the participants were asked to judge whether or not the test sentence was compatible withthe preceding story. For achievement sentences like (8)-(9), the native speakers were expected to accept thetest sentence with the Complete Story (The plane is at the airport) because the achievement verb occurringwith -teiru should be construed with a resultative (or perfective) interpretation. For this reason, the samesentence should be rejected with the Incomplete Story (The plane is still in the sky approaching the airport).
As for the accomplishment sentences, on the other hand, their -teiru form is interpreted as progressive and－111 －

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should be accepted in the Incomplete Story. The data patterns found in this experiment actually demonstrated
an interesting contrast between the L2 learners and native speaker controls. English-speaking L2 learnersof Japanese showed native-like performance with simple past sentences, and also had little difficulty inaccepting the resultative interpretation of achievement -teiru sentences with the Complete Story. However,with the Incomplete Story, the performances of L1 and L2 speakers differed. Whereas native speakers
successfully rejected the achievement -teiru (Hikooki wa kuukoo ni tui-te-imasu, ‘The plane has arrived’),many L2 learners of Japanese (even those with high proficiency) incorrectly accepted such sentences. The
L2 learners seemed to have difficulty in ruling out the progressive interpretation of -teiru, which is allowedby their L1 grammar. In a follow-up study (Gabriele and McClure 2011), they used the same experimental
paradigm to test Chinese-speaking L2 Japanese learners and found that they showed native-like data patterns
in all categories: they accepted the achievement -teiru sentences with the Complete Story but not with theIncomplete Story.
This pattern of results can suggest the role of L1 transfer in L2 acquisition: English-speaking L2
Japanese learners make more errors in understanding the perfective interpretation of -teiru perhaps because
they wrongly apply their L1 knowledge of progressive form (-ing) with achievement verbs that can depict
events that are still in the process of completion in English. However, as Gabriele and Sugita-Hughes
themselves acknowledge, there are many other possible influences concerning the acquisition of the -teiru
aspectual marking. For example, in the follow-up experiment with the Chinese-speaking learners, eventhough they showed native-like performance in the achievement -teiru interpretation, more errors were madein another context involving the past form of -teiru (-teita), the result that Gabriele and McClure (2011)attributed to the interaction of specific properties of L1 and the target L2. Other possible factors to consider
include the type of input and the order of instructions, as suggested in Ishida (2014),1 distinction between
lexical and grammatical aspect encoding, as well as the nominal system of Japanese with respect to event
depiction. Also, according to the results of online processing studies (e.g. Long et al. 2010), learners may
face limitations in their L2 acquisition due to the type of aspectual information available to them online, andthis may be influenced by their L1. Various factors seem to interact in the acquisition of tense and aspect, and
it is far from clear-cut to presume that the experimental findings in Gabriele (2009) are instantiations of L1
transfer; yet, the carefully controlled psycholinguistic experiments reviewed in this Chapter and discussions
illustrate the importance of investigating L2 acquisition of Japanese in psycholinguistics.

3. Japanese Language Processing
Part II of the Handbook is devoted to research on Japanese language processing. As briefly discussed
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head-initial languages such as English. However, as suggested in Yamashita, Hirose and Packard (2010),
evidence from languages with different structural configurations from those of European languages has
become increasingly important today.
3.1. Japanese in L1 Processing
The topics discussed in the series of chapters on L1 Japanese processing are diverse. They include aview of Japanese language processing from a connectionist perspective (Chapter 12), typological differencesin the processing tendencies of subject and object relative clause structures in Japanese (Chapter 14), andan overview of Event Related Potential (ERP) methodologies, which are used in identifying physiologicalresponses to syntactic and semantic dissociations in English and Japanese (Chapter 15). While all of thepapers here show that research findings from head-final, scrambling languages such as Japanese makeimportant contributions to psycholinguistic research in general, I will discuss two of them in more detail.
One on how prosody can affect language processing, and the other on how experimental research andsyntactic research can work together.
Hirose’s paper (Chapter 11) reviews the series of her work on the relationship between prosody andother factors in the processing of ambiguous structures in Japanese. She begins her paper with a discussion
on the role of lexical accent in understanding branching ambiguity. An example is given below.
(10)(Nakayama ed. (2015: 427))

Hirose points out that the preference for the left-branching structure (10a) is expected when we assume
incremental processing. The parsing starts immediately after the first element of the string, and it prefers not
to revise the initially establsihed NP analysis on midori-no inko unless necessary. However, she observes
that the presence or absence of lexical accent in the second noun (inko) may affect the overall pitch properties(or the prosodic structures) of the constituent and, actually, the left-branching preference can be reduced asa result. Whether or not this type of prosodic shift takes place in actual speech is subject to many otherfactors (such as speaker variations) and testing the possible effect of this shift on perception may not be as
straightforward as one might imagine. Still, this discussion illustrates one way of how syntactic processing
mechanism and non-syntactic influences, such as prosody, may interact with one another.
In fact, lexical accent is not the only factor responsible for this type of prosodic pitch changes. Hirose－111 －

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looks into speech production of this branching ambiguity and shows how the visual context, designed to
evoke the speaker awareness of the ambiguity, was found to elicit pitch changes; this is another way thatprosody could influence processing tendencies.
She also discusses the role of constituent length in the resolution of relative clause ambiguity in Japanese.
The results of her self-paced reading experiment manipulating the length (and hence the phonological size)of the constituents of a relative clause indicated that the prosodic cue is evoked in the perceiver’s ambiguity
resolution even in silent reading. This serves as an instantiation of Fodor’s Implicit Prosody Hypothesis(Fodor (2002)), which predicts that even in silent reading, prosodic properties of the string are projected onto
the perceiver’s mind and influence syntactic parsing. Hirose’s research program takes advantage of the headfinal status of Japanese, as well as its prosodic (accentual) properties. The findings of the studies reviewed inthis Chapter demonstrate not only how prosody plays an important role in sentence comprehension, but how
prosody and the other components of grammar, such as syntax, phonology, or discourse, can be interrelated
in language comprehension and production.
Another paper that I wish to introduce in more detail is one by Koizumi (Chapter 13). Based on theseries of the research projects that he is involved in, Koizumi illustrates two types of experimental syntax
investigation on word order processing. The first type, which he identifies as experimental syntax in a broad
sense, aims to investigate how structural parsing tendencies can be characterized. Although both SOV andOSV word orders are possible in Japanese, they are not comparable in terms of their frequency of occurrences
as well as the processing preference. Referring to the findings in Imamura and Koizumi (2011), Koizumi
points out the SOV word order (e.g., Hanako-ga Taroo-o home-ta) is more frequent than the OSV word order(e.g., Taroo-o Hanako-ga hometa). Also, as described in the first section, many experimental studies reportthat the more frequent SOV word order is easier to process than the OSV. How can we explain this? Koizumi
reviewed his experimental studies with Tamaoka and colleagues (Tamaoka et al. (2005)) that have evaluatedthe three logical possibilities (characterized as the Grammatical Functions Hypothesis, the Thematic Roles
Hypothesis, and the Case Marking Hypothesis). A summary of his review is as follows. First, a readingand plausibility judgment study found that the canonical Subject-NonSubject word order is preferred evenin a passive structure, suggesting that we can eliminate the Thematic Roles Hypothesis, since this would
predict the opposite outcome. Another judgment study found that even when the subject NP has the dative
case marker -ni, Subject-NonSubject order was still preferred, which is incompatible with the predictions
made by the Case Marking Hypothesis. Taken together, Tamaoka et al. concluded that the Grammatical
Functions Hypothesis is the most compatible with the behavioral data. In another study (Koizumi andTamaoka (2006)), Koizumi also investigated the effect of word order variations involving adjuncts, in order
to examine whether scrambling of and/or across an adverb would result in higher processing cost. Theirfindings suggested that scrambled structures incur a greater processing cost than canonical structures even－111 －

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in the case of scrambling involving non-arguments. Further, another of his work (Imamura and Koizumi(2008)) found that word order preference interacts with discourse order preference: perceivers generally
prefer the Given-New information structure order, but the difficulty in processing the less preferred NewGiven order in the canonical syntactic order (SOV) was not as evident as that in the non-canonical (OSV)order in their experiments.
In the latter part of the paper, Koizumi discusses experimental syntax in a narrow sense: how
experimental investigation can be employed in order to evaluate competing hypotheses in theoretical syntax.
For example, empirical research on the hierarchy of functional projections can evaluate the cartographic
approach to syntactic structure. He reviews one of his papers (Kimura, Kim and Koizumi (2005)) that
presented empirical evidence to argue that in Japanese, tense and aspect seem to be base-generated in
the same syntactic position, rather than the distinct positions associated with Tense and Aspect positions
respectively, and that the strongest position of the cartographic approach is thus not maintainable. Empiricalevidence was also given in that paper that evaluated competing syntactic analyses of the Subject in theJapanese OSV sentences.
Koizumi and colleagues’ work in the experimental syntax of word order variation reviewed in this
Chapter involves not only Japanese but also Kaqchikel, a Mayan language, where VSO is found to be thebasic word order. The range of studies presented in this Chapter is based on careful examination of syntactic
analyses and their detailed predictions, and his research program will certainly continue to make important
contributions to a better understanding of the nature and characterization of word order variation in humanlanguage.
3.2. Japanese in L2 Processing
The last three chapters of the Handbook are concerned with the relatively new field of L2 Japaneseprocessing. The influence of working memory in L2 Japanese relative clause processing is discussed in
Chapter 16. Chapter 17 concerns L2 Japanese production regarding work on motion description and speecherrors. Chapter 18 introduces findings from the processing of Japanese as a second language by native
speakers of Chinese, investigating the perception of lexical pitch accent, lexical access in the perception of
kanji characters, and the processing of syntactic structures distinct from their L1.

4. Conclusion
The 18 chapters in the Handbook present a state-of-the-art overview of the field of Japanese
psycholinguistics. Due to limited space, the present review has managed to provide only a brief summary ofthis Handbook, with a little more detailed look at some of the studies in scope acquisition, L2 acquisition of－111 －

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tense and aspect, the role of prosody in processing and experimental syntax. This by no means suggests thatthe chapters not discussed extensively here are any less important than the others, and readers are strongly
encouraged to closely read all of the chapters. As the studies reviewed in this volume show, psycholinguistic
research on the Japanese language will surely continue to provide helpful insights towards the universal
theories of language acquisition and processing in general. While there is no question that the Handbook willserve as a comprehensive reference book for those who are already involved in the field, it will also inspire
those who are new to the field of Japanese psycholinguistic research. The insights and inspirations that the
Handbook offers will, I believe, facilitate further research within and between theoretical and empiricalresearch communities in the future.
* I am hugely indebted to those who have given me highly valuable and helpful feedback on the earlier
versions of the paper, including the anonymous reviewer of this issue. I also thank Mark Irwin and Stephen
Ryan for their stylistic suggestions. All remaining errors are my own.

NOTE
1. Gabriele and Sugita-Hughes do acknowledge the possibility suggested in Ishida (2014) that the order of
instructions may be responsible for the order of the L2 acquisition of aspect, although their standpoint, or
working assumption, is still that their experimental findings on L2 aspect acquisition are instantiations of L1
transfer. I thank an anonymous reviewer of English Linguistics for recommending clarification on this point.
In order to resolve this conflation, a study on the proficient L2 speakers who have never received explicit
instructions on Japanese would be informative though, in reality, conducting such research would not be aneasy task due to the particular characteristics of the learner population of Japanese. Unlike English or otherlanguages, Japanese as an L2, especially at the beginning levels, is normally learned through some type of
explicit instructions, rather than through exposure to the language in the naturalistic environment.

REFERENCES
Andersen, Robert and Yasuhiro Shirai (1994) “Discourse Motivations for Some Cognitive Acquisition
Principles,” Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16, 133–56.
Fodor, Janet D. (2002) “Psycholinguistics Cannot Escape Prosody,” Proceedings of the SPEECH PROSODY
2002 Conference, Aix-en-Provence, France.
Gabriele, Alison (2009) “Transfer and Transition in the L2 Acquisition of Aspect,” Studies in Second
Language Acquisition 31, 371-402.
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Gabriele, Alison and William McClure (2011) “Why Some Imperfectives Are Interpreted Imperfectly: A
Study of Chinese Learners of Japanese,” Language Acquisition 18, 39-88.
Gibson, Edward (1998) “Linguistic Complexity: Locality of Syntactic Dependencies,” Cognition 68, 1-76.
Gibson, Edward (2000) “The Dependency Locality Theory: A Distance-Based Theory of Linguistic
Complexity,” Image, Language, Brain: Papers from the First Mind Articulation Project Symposium,
ed. by Alec Marantz, Yasushi Miyashita and Wayne O’Neil, 95–126, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Imamura, Satoshi and Masatoshi Koizumi (2008) “Bunshori-ni Okeru Joho Kozo to Togo Kozo-no
Kogosayo-ni Tuite (On the Interaction between Information Structure and Syntactic Structure in
Sentence Processing),” Proceedings of the 136th Conference of the Linguistic Society of Japan, 212217, Linguistic Society of Japan, Kyoto.
Imamura, Satoshi and Masatoshi Koizumi (2011) “A Centering Analysis of Word Order in Japanese,” Tohoku
Studies in Linguistics 20, 59-74.
Ishida, Midori (2014) “Effects of Recasts on the Acquisition of the Aspectual Form -te i-(ru) by Learners ofJapanese as a Foreign Language,” Language Learning 54, 311–394.
Kimura, Naoki, Jungho Kim, and Masatoshi Koizumi (2005) “Sentence Processing and Phrase Structural
Determinacy of Aspect in Japanese,” Lexicon Forum 1, 133-161.
Koizumi, Masatoshi and Katsuo Tamaoka (2006) “Bunkaisekijikken-Niyoru Nihongo Fukushirui-no
Gojunno Hantei (Determination of Basic Word Order of Adverbs in Japanese by a Sentence Processing
Experiment),” Cognitive Studies 13, 392-403.
Long, Shengyan, Hajime Ono and Hiromu Sakai (2010) “Bunrikai no Katei ni Okeru Jishōtaipu no NinchiNihongo no Asupekuto Jōhōshori o Tegakari ni (Recognition of Event Type in Sentence Comprehension:
A View from Processing of Aspectural Information in Japanese),” Cognitive Studies 17, 313-331.
O’Grady, William (1997) Syntactic Development, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Pinker, Steven (1989) Learnability and Cognition, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Sugaya, Natsue and Yasuhiro Shirai (2007) “The Acquisition of Progressive and Resultative Meanings of theImperfective Aspect Marker by L2 Learners of Japanese: Transfer, Universals, or Multiple Factors?”
Studies in Second Language Acquisition 29, 1-38.
Tamaoka, Katsuo, Hiromu Sakai, Jun-ichiro Kawahara, Yayoi Miyaoka, Hyunjung Lim and Masatoshi
Koizumi (2005) “Priority Information Used for the Processing of Japanese Sentences: Thematic Roles,
Case Particles or Grammatical Functions?” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 34, 273-324.
Yamashita, Hiroko, Yuki Hirose and Jerome L. Packard eds. (2010) Processing and Producing Head-Final
Structures, Springer, Dordrecht.

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Handbook of Japanese Psycholinguistics (Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics, v. 9)Ed. by Mineharu Nakayama, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin,2015, xlii+635pp.――KOIZUMIBook Review

Handbook of Japanese Psycholinguistics(Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics, v. 9)
Ed. by Mineharu Nakayama, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin,
2015, xlii+635pp.

Yukiko KOIZUMIThis article presents a concise review of the Handbook of Japanese Psycholinguistics edited byMineharu Nakayama, a recent addition to the Handbooks of Japanese Language and Linguistics series.
The 18 papers included in the Handbook represent the state-of-the-art of the fast-growing field of Japanese
psycholinguistics, ranging from the acquisition and processing (comprehension and production) of Japaneseas the first language and a second language. The L1 acquisition of scope, the L2 acquisition of aspect, therole of prosody in the resolution of structural ambiguity, and experimental syntax giving insights on word
order processing and the cartographic approach in theoretical syntax, are some of the topics introducedwith a closer look in the review. I am certain that not only these select papers but all of the chapters inthe Handbook will educate readers on the latest research advances in Japanese psycholinguistics, and the
Handbook will certainly help open up for further cross-disciplinary research possibilities within and between
theoretical and empirical research communities.

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