How universal or varied can the language processing mechanism be? : a psycholinguistic investigation on the role of context and prosody

2016 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 26370473
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C)
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Section: 一般
• Research Field: Linguistics
• Research Institution: Yamagata University
• Principal Investigator: KOIZUMI YUKIKO 山形大学, 人文学部, 准教授 (40551536)
• Research Collaborator: FODOR JANET DEAN ニューヨーク市立大学, 大学院・言語学科, 教授 ; BRADLEY DIANNE ニューヨーク市立大学, 大学院・言語学科, 教授 ; FERNANDEZ EVA M. ニューヨーク市立大学, 大学院・言語学科, 教授 ; DEMESTRE JOSEP ロビラ・イ・ビルジリ大学, 心理学科, 準教授 ; IGOA JOSE MANUEL マドリッド自治大学, 基礎心理学科, 教授
• Project Period (FY): 2014-04-01 – 2017-03-31
• Keywords: 心理言語学 / 作用域曖昧性の処理 / 英語 / スペイン語

Outline of Final Research Achievements

This project explored on the role of non-syntactic factors, especially prosody, in the processing of the scope ambiguity involving negation and the 'because' clause. The three major findings are as follows. First, the results of a detailed data analysis of an elicited production experiment confirmed that the prosodic properties of the two readings are indeed distinct from each other, supplementing the findings of the previous silent reading experiment. Second, we also found that this distinction was not found in the same elicited production task for the L2 learners of English, also compatible with the previous L2 experiment. Third, a project on the equivalent construction in Spanish, which manipulates verb mood, has been launched and baseline data were obtained. Further fruitful progress is anticipated towards better understanding how universal or varied the human language processing mechanism can be, and how can prosody and/or context contribute to language comprehension.

Free Research Field

心理言語学