Parallelism Between Sentence Structure and Nominal Phrases in Japanese: Evidence from Scrambled Instrumental and Locative Adverbial Phrases

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Abstract

The present study investigated the canonical position of instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in both Japanese sentences and noun phrases to determine whether the canonical positions are parallel. A series of sentence/phrase decision tasks were used to compare sentences with different word-orders, including sentences with S AdvOV (S is subject phrase, Adv adverb, O object phrase and V verb), AdvSOV, S AdvOV and SO AdvV word orders. S AdvOV word order was found to be the most quickly processed, for both instrumental adverbial (Experiment 1) and locative adverbial phrases (Experiment 2). Thus, the canonical position for these adverbial phrases is identified as the position immediately preceding the object (Theme argument). This finding was replicated when the same experimental methods were applied to event-denoting noun phrases. Adverbial adjuncts in the initial position ( AdvON, N is noun phrase) were processed more quickly and accurately than noun phrases with adverbial phrases in the second position (O AdvN), for both instrumental adverbial (Experiment 3) and locative adverbial phrases (Experiment 4). Therefore, the position immediately preceding the object is the canonical position for both instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in sentences and in noun phrases. In conclusion, this indicates that the base structure of a sentence is shared by its related noun phrase.

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This paper investigates the role of resource allocation as a source of processing difficulty in human sentence comprehension. The paper proposes a simple information-theoretic characterization of processing difficulty as the work incurred by resource reallocation during parallel, incremental, probabilistic disambiguation in sentence comprehension, and demonstrates its equivalence to the theory of Hale [Hale, J. (2001). A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. In Proceedings of NAACL (Vol. 2, pp. 159-166)], in which the difficulty of a word is proportional to its surprisal (its negative log-probability) in the context within which it appears. This proposal subsumes and clarifies findings that high-constraint contexts can facilitate lexical processing, and connects these findings to well-known models of parallel constraint-based comprehension. In addition, the theory leads to a number of specific predictions about the role of expectation in syntactic comprehension, including the reversal of locality-based difficulty patterns in syntactically constrained contexts, and conditions under which increased ambiguity facilitates processing. The paper examines a range of established results bearing on these predictions, and shows that they are largely consistent with the surprisal theory.

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Modeling the Effects of Perceptual Load: Saliency, Competitive Interactions, and Top-Down Biases

Kleanthis Neokleous, Andria Shimi, Marios Avraamides (2016)

A computational model of visual selective attention has been implemented to account for experimental findings on the Perceptual Load Theory (PLT) of attention. The model was designed based on existing neurophysiological findings on attentional processes with the objective to offer an explicit and biologically plausible formulation of PLT. Simulation results verified that the proposed model is capable of capturing the basic pattern of results that support the PLT as well as findings that are considered contradictory to the theory. Importantly, the model is able to reproduce the behavioral results from a dilution experiment, providing thus a way to reconcile PLT with the competing Dilution account. Overall, the model presents a novel account for explaining PLT effects on the basis of the low-level competitive interactions among neurons that represent visual input and the top-down signals that modulate neural activity. The implications of the model concerning the debate on the locus of selective attention as well as the origins of distractor interference in visual displays of varying load are discussed.

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Edward Gibson (1998)

This paper proposes a new theory of the relationship between the sentence processing mechanism and the available computational resources. This theory--the Syntactic Prediction Locality Theory (SPLT)--has two components: an integration cost component and a component for the memory cost associated with keeping track of obligatory syntactic requirements. Memory cost is hypothesized to be quantified in terms of the number of syntactic categories that are necessary to complete the current input string as a grammatical sentence. Furthermore, in accordance with results from the working memory literature both memory cost and integration cost are hypothesized to be heavily influenced by locality (1) the longer a predicted category must be kept in memory before the prediction is satisfied, the greater is the cost for maintaining that prediction; and (2) the greater the distance between an incoming word and the most local head or dependent to which it attaches, the greater the integration cost. The SPLT is shown to explain a wide range of processing complexity phenomena not previously accounted for under a single theory, including (1) the lower complexity of subject-extracted relative clauses compared to object-extracted relative clauses, (2) numerous processing overload effects across languages, including the unacceptability of multiply center-embedded structures, (3) the lower complexity of cross-serial dependencies relative to center-embedded dependencies, (4) heaviness effects, such that sentences are easier to understand when larger phrases are placed later and (5) numerous ambiguity effects, such as those which have been argued to be evidence for the Active Filler Hypothesis.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Katsuo Tamaoka:

ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1192-0358

ktamaoka@gc4.so-net.ne.jp

Takane Ito: ito@boz.c.u-tokyo.ac.jp

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): J Psycholinguist Res

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): J Psycholinguist Res

Title: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

Publisher: Springer US (New York )

ISSN (Print): 0090-6905

ISSN (Electronic): 1573-6555

Publication date (Electronic): 6 April 2022

Publication date PMC-release: 6 April 2022

Publication date (Print): 2022

Volume: 51

Issue: 3

Pages: 501-519

Affiliations

[1 ]GRID grid.67293.39, School of Foreign Languages, , Hunan University, ; Lushan Road (S), Yuelu District, Changsha City, Hunan Province 410082 China

[2 ]GRID grid.27476.30, ISNI 0000 0001 0943 978X, Graduate School of Humanities, , Nagoya University, ; Furo-cho, Chikusaku, Nagoya, Aichi 464-8601 Japan

[3 ]GRID grid.26999.3d, ISNI 0000 0001 2151 536X, Graduate School of Interdisciplinary Information Studies, the University of Tokyo, ; 3-8-1, Komaba, Meguroku, Tokyo, 153-8902 Japan

[4 ]GRID grid.39158.36, ISNI 0000 0001 2173 7691, Research Faculty of Media and Communication, , Hokkaido University, ; Nishi 8-chome, Kita 17-jo, Kitaku, Sappro, Hokaido 060-0817 Japan

Author information

Katsuo Tamaoka http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1192-0358

Article

Publisher ID: 9843

DOI: 10.1007/s10936-022-09843-1

PMC ID: 9170631

PubMed ID: 35384528

SO-VID: 6ebf4c8d-9752-4a9a-8266-da92ea78d96f

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Open AccessThis article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

History

Date accepted : 25 January 2022

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry

Keywords: nominalization,parallelism,locative adverbial phrases,instrumental adverbial phrases,canonical order,scrambling

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ScienceOpen disciplines: Clinical Psychology & Psychiatry

Keywords: nominalization, parallelism, locative adverbial phrases, instrumental adverbial phrases, canonical order, scrambling

Parallelism Between Sentence Structure and Nominal Phrases in Japanese: Evidence from Scrambled Instrumental and Locative Adverbial Phrases

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Most cited references 26

Expectation-based syntactic comprehension.

Modeling the Effects of Perceptual Load: Saliency, Competitive Interactions, and Top-Down Biases

Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies.

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