The Complexity of Nested Structures in Japanese

Abstract

This article presents two questionnaire experiments that investigate the processing complexity of a variety of nested constructions in Japanese. The first experiment demonstrated that embedded structures containing a direct object NP in the most embedded clause were more complex than comparable nested structures that lacked an object NP in the most embedded clause. The second experiment demonstrated that a construction consisting of a relative clause embedded within a sentential complement is less complex than the reverse embedding, consisting of sentential complement embedded within a relative clause. These results are discussed in terms of the syntactic prediction locality theory (Gibson 1998).* 1. SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY. It has long been observed that structures with nested syntactic dependencies are difficult to process (Chomsky 1957, 1965, Yngve 1960, Chomsky & Miller 1963, Miller & Chomsky 1963, Miller & Isard 1964.1 For example, the English sentences in 1 are associated with increasing processing complexity.(1) a. 2 A sentence like 1c is said to be doubly nested/center-embedded, because a second S′ (who John met yesterday) interrupts the subject-verb dependency in the first S′ (the photographer took). Ex. 1a, which includes no nested dependencies, is the easiest to process. A structure like 1b, which contains one nested structure, is more complex (Hakes et al.

Computational principles of working memory in sentence comprehension

“…This relatively simple complexity metric can account for a variety of offline and online behavioral data, at least in English and Japanese [2,8,34]. The basis of the metric in discourse processing complexity receives support from a study [37] that manipulated the referential type of intervening noun phrases while keeping length constant; reading times were faster at crucial verbs when the intervening nouns were referentially more accessible.…”

“…• Increased empirical attention to crosslinguistic phenomena that reveal constraints on working memory, independently of ambiguity resolution [8][9][10][11][12].…”

Children's Comprehension of Relative Clauses in an Ergative Language: The Case of Basque

“…For Babyonyshev & Gibson (1999), only elements that introduce new discourse referents (NPs and main verbs) enter into the calculation of distance between the gap and the filler.Downloaded by [University of California, San Francisco] at 09:35 14 December 2014 RELATIVE CLAUSES IN L1 BASQUE…”

Case Matching and Conflicting Bindings Interference

“…Apparently, processing is easier if the case of the pronoun matches that of its antecedent. This phenomenon seems quite unexpected, given the reverse pattern in the findings of Babyonyshev and Gibson (1999) and Fedorenko et al (2004). In their experiments, identical case marking did not facilitate but rather hindered processing.…”

“…Similar effects can be found for animacy (Suckow, Vasishth & Lewis, 2005) and case marking. Regarding case marking, Babyonyshev and Gibson (1999) collected complexity ratings for double-embedded Japanese sentences in which two of the grammatical subjects were always marked with the nominative case marker -ga while a third one was either marked with -ga or with the topic marker -wa. Although both options are grammatical in Japanese, participants found the sentences with two nominative markers and one topic marker easier to understand than sentences with three nominative markers.…”