An On-Line Study of Japanese Nesting Complexity
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Nakatani & Gibson in press Cog Sci.pdf
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Author(s) •
Nakatani, Kentaro
Gibson, Edward A.
Date Issued
January 2010
Journal
Cognitive Science
Publisher
Cognitive Science Society, Inc.
Citation
Nakatani, Kentaro and Edward Gibson. "An on-Line Study of Japanese Nesting Complexity." Cognitive Science, 34.1, p.94–112 (2010)
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
This paper reports the results of a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese in which the materials consisted of four versions of successively more nested syntactic structures. It was found that (1) people read the more nested materials slower than the less nested materials; and (2) the locus of the relative slowdown occurred early in the nested structures. There was no corresponding slowdown when processing the verbs at the end of each clause. The results are therefore not predicted by retrieval-based integration accounts of syntactic complexity. Rather, the results support expectation-based accounts of syntactic complexity for these materials.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01067.x