Real-time Analysis of the comprehension process of sentences with empty subjects

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It is one of the fundamental issues to investigate how we "understand" a given expression. We try to elucidate the process of "understanding" as a cognitive process through the study of sentence processing.First, we consider some processing models based on linguistic theory. The actual target of our investigation was the process of understanding sentences with empty subjects (or, missing subjects) in Japanese. Particularly, we are interested in detecting the sentence processing in "real-time". We conducted an experiment using computationally synthesized sentences. The task was Yes-No decision. Furthermore, we examined the effect of exchanging the order of the subject and object in the sentence. In both orders, we observed a "subject preference" phenomena. This effect disappears in the course of time. This experimental findings suggest that the sentence processing mechanism operates in the "top-down" procedure at first, and then in the "bottom-up" procedure. Thus, we obtained a new knowledge concerning the understanding of "empty" element in a sentence.Although there are some research works concerning parsing of Japanese, this kind of co-operative work by linguist and psychologist are rare. This findings mentioned above are some out-come of the joint research. In the future, new products of this kind of joint research will increase.