Analysis of Real-time Processing of Empty Subjects

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Through a series of experiments, this study examined how Japanese speakers understood the empty subject sentence in which a "subject" (or, , an agent) is not specified. First, a "subject preference" is observed irrespective of the word order. Moreover, it became clear that a top-down prediction was made before the verb appears at the end of a sentence. However, the subject preference phenomenon became faint when the experimental task was changed from the recognition task to the retrieval task.Considering the results of such psychological experiments, it is suggested that the mechanism of the sentence processing transfers from the top-down process to the bottom-up process according to the time transition. The "reaction repertory" explained this change of mental processes. This is why the sentence comprehension is effectively performed during a short time and without serious errors.Moreover, the present study tried to examine how the language processing mechanism is related to the neurophysiological system. The recent study about the language processing moved ahead in the form of the cooperation study from the various disciplines. Especially, the study of the language processing tries to reach a new phase as the recent brain science develops. An expression like 'soft color' involves a mismatch between the tactile and the visual sensory modalities. Observing these mismatch expressions, we notice that 'soft color' is easier to comprehend than 'red touch'. Among sensory mismatch expressions, thus, there seems to be a difference of 'comprehensibleness'. We obtained very interesting findings that this difference of comprehensiveness was reflected in the difference of brain hemisphere.