Syntactic difficulty in English and Japanese: A textual study

This paper presents statistical analyses of the syntactic structures found in some spoken texts in English and Japanese. By studying the products of performance spoken English and Japanese texts in particular we will examine how much strain is caused on the working memory of speakers and hearers during the processes of speech production. By measuring difficulty in terms of “dependency distance” it is possible to compare texts in the two languages. The results show that Japanese texts are syntactically no more difficult than English ones.

[1]  Michael T. Turvey,et al.  An auditory analogue of the sperling partial report procedure: Evidence for brief auditory storage , 1972 .

[2]  H. Stephen Straight,et al.  Concept, Image, and Symbol , 1993 .

[3]  菅山 謙正,et al.  Word Grammar 理論の研究 , 2005 .

[4]  B. Sakitt,et al.  Iconic memory. , 1976, Psychological review.

[5]  Philipp Koehn,et al.  Cognitive Psychology , 1992, Ageing and Society.

[6]  George Lakoff,et al.  Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things , 1987 .

[7]  Richard Hudson,et al.  English word grammar , 1995 .

[8]  So Hiranuma,et al.  Measuring the processing load of Japanese words , 1998 .

[9]  A. Baddeley,et al.  Word length and the structure of short-term memory , 1975 .

[10]  G. Lakoff.  Women, fire, and dangerous things : what categories reveal about the mind , 1989 .

[11]  Edward Gibson,et al.  A computational theory of human linguistic processing: memory limitations and processing breakdown , 1991 .

[12]  N. Moray,et al.  EXPERIMENTS ON THE FOUR-EARED MAN. , 1965, The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

[13]  M. D’Esposito.  Working memory. , 2008, Handbook of clinical neurology.

[14]  T. Odlin,et al.  Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind , 1987 .

[15]  Barbara Mayer,et al.  Concept Image And Symbol The Cognitive Basis Of Grammar , 2016 .

[16]  E. Gibson.  Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies , 1998, Cognition.

[17]  Alan D. Baddeley,et al.  Inner Active Processes in Reading: The Inner Voice, the Inner Ear, and the Inner Eye , 2017 .