Psycholinguistic research on Japanese sentence comprehension

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

In order to explain the process of the language understanding by human, psycholinguistic research is necessary. In this research, the explanation should be based on a linguistic theory taking results of psychological experiments into consideration. In Japan, however, because the research had been preceded in two different disciplines of linguistics and psychology respectively, the results of each other's field neither had been shared nor had been made use of fully. Therefore, this research aimed at showing the direction of the future research by paying attention to the process of the "Japanese sentence comprehension" and by examining synthetically the previous researches in the field of linguistics and psychology. In order for that, the researchers who are actively engaged in the research of the Japanese sentence comprehension should gather and put together the knowledge, which everyone accumulated so far. The research of the following sentence constructions was performed. (1)Before a … More sentence final verb appears, what kind of process is involved in the "empty subject sentence" in which the subject is omitted? (2)Is the "scrambled sentence",in which word order is reversed, difficult to understand? (3)Why is the "garden-path sentence",in which one tends to give a wrong interpretation, difficult to comprehend? (4)What happens in the "reanalysis" that corrects the wrong interpretation?It will be said that this research has based on the methodology with a balance between theory and experiment because this is a joint research of linguists and the psychologists. Moreover, this research has the possibility to develop deeper and more widely by connection with the research of speech defect and neuroscience, and by interchange with researchers of foreign countries. Since human language understanding is one representative of the higher-level cognitive activity, we can get penetration to the general mechanism of the human information processing by making clear the mechanism of language understanding. Less