Examination of Syntactic Constraints and Modeling of Verbal Working Memory by Experimental Study of Sentence Comprehension

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The objective of this study is to examine the validity of syntactic constraints in real-time sentence processing and the relevance of verbal working memory constraints to the processing by psychological experiments on Japanese sentence comprehension.Some experiments were carried out to examine the roles of case-markings and thematic constraint in Japanese sentence processing. The first series of experiments were intended to examine the processing of Japanese sentences including the words ambiguous between nouns and verbs by the self-paced non-cumulative moving-window reading paradigm. The results suggested that case-markings and thematic constraint were incrementally utilized to build thematic relations, and that the pragmatic plausibility of a sentence affected the disambiguation of the ambiguous words. On the basis of these results, we pointed out the typological problems of English parsing models in their application to Japanese, and we proposed a new model valid for Japanese sentence processing. We performed some experiments to suggest the validity of our model in many types of Japanese sentence.We also discussed the individual differences of verbal working memory estimated by Japanese Reading Span Test and analyzed the correlation between the scores in the test and the speed and accuracy in sentence processing. Our experimental results indicated that readers with high scores in the test tended to comprehend the reanalysis sentences with great processing load more accurately than those with low scores, but the former spent longer time for their comprehension than the latter. In the standard literature of cognitive psychology, trade-off is often assumed for performance speed and accuracy. Our results suggests, however, that the priority of processing speed or accuracy is determined not arbitrarily but by the individual difference of verbal working memory constraints.