<p>The current study examines Japanese loanwords from English in the framework of optimality theory (OT). The goal of this study is to investigate which vowels native Japanese-speaking borrowers epenthesize and when they delete consonants in modifying English source words. We aim to offer (i) a unified explanation with a single ranking of constraints for vowel epenthesis and (ii) a perceptual explanation for consonant deletion. Two experiments with native Japanese speakers were conducted to support the proposed analyses. The first experiment demonstrated that, when modifying illicit phonotactics in foreign words, native Japanese speakers select epenthetic vowels based on the constraint ranking of: Complex, CodaCond >> Max-IO >> Palatal-Front, SyllableInventoryStructure (SIS), Ident-IO >> *Round, *Low >> *Front >> High >> Back >> Dep-IO. The second experiment revealed that Japanese loanwords can be subject to deletion of consonants rather than vowel epenthesis, due to the lack of perceptual salience; Japanese speakers delete consonants when they fail to perceive consonants in coda and clusters in source words, especially when the source words are aurally given.</p>
When reading sentences with an anaphoric reference to a subject antecedent, repeated-name anaphors result in slower reading times relative to pronouns (the Repeated Name Penalty: RNP), and overt pronouns are read slower than null pronouns (the Overt Pronoun Penalty: OPP). Because in most languages previously tested, the grammatical subject is typically also the discourse topic it remains unclear whether these effects reflect anaphors' subject-hood or their topic-hood. To address this question we conducted a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese, a language which morphologically marks both subjects and topics overtly. Our results show that both repeated-name topic-subject anaphors and repeated-name non-topic-subject anaphors exhibit the RNP and that both overt-pronoun topic-subject and overt-pronoun non-topic-subject anaphors show the OPP. However, a detailed examination of performance revealed an interaction between the anaphor topic marking, reference form, and the antecedent's grammatical status, indicating that the effect of the antecedent's grammatical status is strongest for null pronoun and repeated name subject anaphors and that the overt form most similar to null pronouns is the repeated name topic anaphor. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of anaphor processing.
This study investigates the role of exposure to English on discourse-reference processing by native Japanese speakers. Shoji et al. (2016a, The repeated name penalty, the overt pronoun penalty, and topic in Japanese. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007 %2Fs10936-016-9424-4) found that Japanese-English bilinguals residing in the United States show a Repeated Name Penalty (RNP; Gordon et al. 1993. Pronouns, names, and the centering of attention in discourse. Cognitive Science 17. 311–347) and an Overt Pronoun Penalty (OPP; Gelormini-Lezama and Almor 2011, Repeated names, overt pronouns, and null pronouns in Spanish. Language Cognitive Processes 26. 437–454) in Japanese with both topic (wa-marked) subject anaphors and non-topic (ga-marked) subject anaphors, indicating that the different morphological markings on anaphors do not alter these effects. In contrast, more recent data collected from L1-immersed Japanese speakers residing in Japan (Shoji et al. 2016b, The repeated name penalty and the overt pronoun penalty in Japanese. Unpublished manuscript) show that these speakers do not show a RNP or an OPP for topic-marked anaphors. Here we report a reanalysis of Shoji et al.’s (2016a) results showing that these effects are moderated by participants’ Age of Arrival (AOA; i. e. the age at which participants first arrived to the place where their second language is regularly spoken). Participants with an early AOA showed differential processing patterns for topic-marked anaphors and non-topic anaphors, while participants with late AOA did not. We propose as an explanation that early AOA bilinguals represent different languages separately, while late AOA bilinguals tend to rely on a single unified language system.
This study investigated native English speakers’ acquisition of the constraint for topic-wa and the preference for subject-ga in multiple-clause sentences in Japanese. The constraint for topic-wa is that the topic-wa cannot appear in certain types of subordinate clauses, and the preference for subject-ga is that the overt subject-ga in a subordinate clause should not overlap the topic for a matrix clause. Two sentence-completion experiments were conducted with native English-speaking participants, who were considered advanced-level Japanese learners, as well as native Japanese-speaking participants (the control group). The results indicated that although English speakers followed the constraint for the topic-wa, they frequently used the topic-wa as non-subject topics (unlike native Japanese speakers) when an embedded subordinate clause intervened between the topic-wa and the rest of the matrix clause. Also, English speakers used the same subject-ga for both subordinate and matrix clauses, unlike the native Japanese speakers’ preference. The outcome implies that English speakers associated the topic-wa with English non-subject topics, and the subject-ga with English subjects.
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