The Role of Punctuation in Processing Relative-Clause Sentence Constructions in Japanese

In the present study, self-paced reading and event-related potential experiments were conducted to explore the roles commas play in reading complex sentences in Japanese, a language in which punctuation rules are less strictly imposed. The results strongly indicated that commas could immediately activate a complex-sentence structure and affect the processing of the following inputs; however, this activation was suggested to be predominated by a strong bias toward the simplex-sentence interpretations when the following inputs were consistent with the simplex-sentence structures.