Examination of Domain-Specificity of Syntactic Knowledge by Experimental Study of Japanese Complex Sentences with Discontinuous Dependency

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Syntactic and phonological knowledge are generally assumed to be domain-specific. The subject-verb agreement in English, for example, is independent from the phonological property of a subject. In speech, however, prosody often facilitates the building of dependency relations between elements in a sentence, and implicit prosody in silent reading affects the interpretational preference. Further, syntactic structure can determine the application of phonological rule in compound nouns in Japanese and English, and some linguistic theories assume interaction between phonological and syntactic rules. This study examines the domain-specificity of syntactic knowledge by psychological experiments on Japanese discontinuous dependency.In 2005 academic year, we recorded the speech of Japanese complex sentences involving discontinuous dependency by Japanese native speakers, and generalized the prosodic property peculiar to Japanese discontinuous dependency. In 2006 academic year, we performed some experiments to auditorily present Japanese discontinuous sentences to Japanese native speakers with relevant prosodic features manipulated. The experimental results indicated that the effect of prosodic property was restricted as far as grammatical judgment were concerned.