Processing of non-canonical word orders in (in)felicitous contexts: evidence from event-related brain potentials

ABSTRACT

In many languages with flexible word orders, canonical word order has a processing advantage over non-canonical word orders. This observation suggests that it is more costly for the parser to represent syntactically complex sentences. Alternatively, this phenomenon may relate to pragmatic factors because most previous studies have presented non-canonical word orders without felicitous context, which violates participants’ expectations regarding the information structure. The present study conducted an event-related potential experiment to examine the locus of the processing difficulty associated with non-canonical word orders in Japanese by manipulating word order (SOV vs. OSV) and the givenness of arguments. The results showed that OSV elicited a sustained left anterior negativity from O to S and a P600 effect at S compared to that of SOV in the infelicitous but not in the felicitous context. This result suggests that the processing difficulty of non-canonical word orders in Japanese is alleviated by discourse factors.

KEYWORDS:

• Word order
• givenness
• filler-gap dependency
• Japanese
• event-related potentials

Acknowledgements

We thank anonymous reviewers and the editor for their insightful comments. We are also grateful to Mineharu Nakayama, Ellen Lau, Hajime Ono, and Shin Fukuda for their helpful comments. This study was supported by JSPS KAKENHI (#15H02603, PI: Masatoshi Koizumi), a Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellows (#13J04854, PI: Masataka Yano) and Kyushu University Wakaba Project (#30203, PI: Masataka Yano).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Masataka Yano http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4465-8456

Notes

1. They also observed a P600 again at the adverb (“toto” finally). The successive P600 effects may be due to a temporal ambiguity of an original position of the filler. If the parser actively attempts to fill a gap (Active Filler Strategy, Frazier & Clifton, 1989), it should perform a gap-filling parsing at S first and do so again at the adverb after detecting a final gap position.

2. One might wonder whether repeating proper names in the context and the target sentences sounds unnatural because they are discourse-old information. However, Tsuchiya, Yoshimura, and Nakayama (2015) reported that native Japanese speakers overwhelmingly preferred the use of referential nouns (e.g. definite NPs) to pronouns in the narrative telling task, unlike in English, in which pronouns are preferred to refer to a discourse-old referent. Hence, the repeated use of proper names is not problematic in Japanese. However, because the preceding context renders an NP a topic of a discourse, marking it with a nominative or accusative case instead of a topic marker (-wa) is not frequent in Japanese. However, Hirotani and Schumacher (2011) did not observe any difference between the nominative and the topic S when it was mentioned in the preceding context. Thus, it is unlikely that this affected our results. Furthermore, the use of a topic marker “-wa” for discourse-given NPs is problematic for the purpose of the current experiment because this induces an S-O ambiguity. Assuming that the native Japanese speakers disambiguate ambiguous sentences into canonical sentences, O-wa_givenS-ga_newV (O-top S-nom V) should be temporarily analysed as a canonical SOV sentence until encountering S. Accordingly, such a sentence should not elicit a SLAN effect, making it impossible to examine how it is affected by discourse-level information.

3. In single-word analyses, the ERP of the baseline time window was analysed to ensure that ERP difference was not induced as a result of the baseline correction procedure. The results reveal no significant main effect or interaction at the baseline time window when the ERPs were time-locked to the onset of the previous region.

4. An important caveat is that Nieuwland, Petersson, and Van Berkum (2007) found an increased activation for a referentially ambiguous pronoun at the medial prefrontal region, which is different from the left inferior frontal gyrus that activates during the processing of non-canonical word orders (Grewe et al., 2007; Kim et al., 2009; Kinno, Kawamura, Shioda, & Sakai, 2008).

5. The mean peak latency of the positivity was calculated for each channel with the ERP Measurement Tool of ERPLAB (Lopez-Calderon & Luck, 2014) by finding a latency in which the greatest positivity was observed between 300 and 900 ms of NP2. The statistical analyses were conducted in the same way as reported in Section 3.5.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the JSPS KAKENHI (#15H02603, PI: Masatoshi Koizumi), a Grant-in-Aid for JSPS Research Fellows (#13J04854, PI: Masataka Yano) and Kyushu University Wakaba Project (#30203, PI: Masataka Yano).