Contextual influence on the prediction in processing sentences

2019 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K02545
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Kwansei Gakuin University
• Principal Investigator: NAKANO Yoko 関西学院大学, 人間福祉学部, 教授 (20380298)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-10-21 – 2020-03-31
• Keywords: 文処理 / 文脈情報 / 予測 / 日本語

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Japanese is a language in which a head--the core of a phrase, clause and sentence, such as verbs, appears at the end. Since the head carries the information about their structures, the head finality could cause a difficulty in predicting structures prior to the appearance of the head. The results, however, indicate the following possibilities: A constituent of a sentence makes its readers predict the appearance of a particular constituent in Japanese; Even advanced learners have difficulty in predicting it; Even when the contextual information is provided, syntactic processing comes before contextual information; The contextual information influences syntactic processing but its effect is not very strong; and The semantic information of extra-sentential context facilitated the choice of antecedents of semantically-biased relative clauses, therefore, it is possible that the semantic information of extra-sentential context influenced semantic processing of sentences.

Free Research Field

言語学

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

日本語のようなヘッド後置の言語では、文処理中に立てられた予測は、文末に至るまで予測とは異なる構成素が出現して外れる可能性がある。しかし日本語で文脈情報により処理が促進されることや情報の種類によって影響を与えるタイミングが異なることは、ヘッド後置型言語で文脈情報が予測が外れる可能性を小さくして高速でダイナミックに進む文処理をより促進する働きをしていると考えられる。また上級レベルであっても第二言語では必ずしも母語話者と同じように予測を立てることが困難であることから、外国語教育等に応用できる可能性がある。