Influence of Contextual Information on Sentence Processing

2014 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 24520484
• 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): 2012-04-01 – 2015-03-31
• Keywords: 文脈情報 / 関係節付加曖昧構文 / 統語処理 / 日本語 / 英語

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This study investigated the influence of contextual information in the text preceding a complex noun phrase involving ambiguous relative-clause attachments (a relative clause+ NPa no NPb) in Japanese. A corpus study revealed several types of relationships between the antecedents and their corresponding referents in the preceding text. The results for offline experiments indicated contextual influence on relative-clause attachments. The first-pass duration obtained in eye-tracking experiments showed the overall facilitation effect of context but it did not indicate any significant interaction between the contextual conditions and attachment biases or did not indicate any contextual influence on the attachment decision at the early stage of processing. The experiments were also conducted in L1 and L2 English. Although the results for L1 English were similar to those for the Japanese experiments, those for L2 English indicated the contextual influence from the early stage of processing.

Free Research Field

心理言語学