Brain mechanisms of interaction between working memory and sentence processing in Japanese

2017 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 15K02554
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: National Rehabilitation Center for Persons with Disabilities
• Principal Investigator: Makuuchi Michiru 国立障害者リハビリテーションセンター(研究所), 研究所 脳機能系障害研究部, 研究室長 (70334232)
• Research Collaborator: IWABUCHI Toshiki 浜松医科大学, 子どものこころの発達研究センター, 特任助教 (20711518)
• Project Period (FY): 2015-04-01 – 2018-03-31
• Keywords: かき混ぜ文 / fMRI / 日本語 / 系列位置効果 / ワーキングメモリ

Outline of Final Research Achievements

Neuroimaging studies have observed that scrambling construction requires more cost for processing in many languages. Why we produce such a costly sentences? Analysis of Japanese corpus found that scrambled sentences often have 'heavy' object noun phrase (NP) modified with a clause. We examined brain activation during the processing of sentences with heavy object NP.Results showed that the heavy object NP scrambling did not cause brain activation increase compared to its canonical counterpart. We conclude that the motivation to produce scrambled word orders is that placing the longer NP at the sentence initial position can mitigate the cost of processing than having it in the middle position as in the serial order effect in working memory.

Free Research Field

認知神経科学