Real-Time Computation of Japanese Exclamatives and the Strength of Locality Biases in Sentence Comprehension (特集 文理解の認知メカニズム)

This paper investigates mechanisms of long-distance dependency formation in language comprehension, using experimental data on the processing of Japanese interrogatives and exclamatives to explore the nature of locality biases in parsing. Findings on the processing of exclamative wh-phrases are compared to previous results involving the processing of interrogative wh-phrases, revealing both similarities and differences. Experiment 1 uses a sentence fragment completion task with in-situ and fronted exclamative and interrogative wh-phrases. Both types of in-situ wh-phrase show a strong bias for local generation of licensing particles. Conditions with fronted wh-phrases show a contrast between interrogative and exclamative wh-phrases: interrogatives show a bias for interpretation in an embedded clause, replicating previous evidence for a long-distance scrambling bias in Japanese (Aoshima, Phillips, & Weinberg, 2004); in contrast, the long-distance scrambling bias is weaker for fronted exclamative wh-phrases. Experiment 2 uses an on-line self-paced reading task to investigate the processing consequences of expectations for a local licensor for in-situ exclamative wh-phrases. Results indicate processing disruption when readers fail to encounter a licensor for an exclamative wh-phrase at the first possible verb position, although the disruption is weaker than the Typing Mismatch Effect shown for interrogatives in previous studies by Miyamoto and Takahashi (2002). Different possible accounts of the parallels and contrasts between processing of interrogatives and exclamatives are discussed.