An ERP study of the processing of subject and object relative clauses in Japanese

Abstract

Using reading times and event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we investigated the processing of Japanese subject and object relative clauses (SRs/ORs). Previous research on English relative clauses shows that ORs take longer to read (King & Just, 1991) and elicit anterior negativity between fillers and gaps (King & Kutas, 1995), which is attributed to increased working memory load due to longer filler-gap distance. In contrast to English, gaps in Japanese relative clauses are less clearly marked and precede their fillers, and the linear gap-filler distance is shorter in ORs than in SRs. Nevertheless, Japanese ORs take longer to read (Ishizuka, Nakatani, & Gibson, 2003; Miyamoto & Nakamura, 2003), perhaps because in both English and Japanese, gaps in ORs are more deeply embedded, with the result that there is longer structural distance between filler and gap in their syntactic representations (O'Grady, 1997). We investigated how gap-filler association in Japanese would compare to filler-gap association in English, and whether it is linear or structural distance that determines comprehension difficulty. The results showed higher processing costs for ORs than SRs in both reading times and ERPs, and thus are most consistent with a structural distance account. The results also showed that gap-filling difficulty manifests itself as larger centro-posterior positivity in ERP responses to Japanese OR sentences, just as it does in English long-distance dependencies (cf. Kaan, Harris, Gibson, & Holcomb, 2000; Phillips, Kazanina, & Abada, 2005; Gouvea, Phillips, Kazanina, & Poeppel, 2007). There is also evidence that there is a probabilistic cue of a gap in Japanese OR sentences that triggers anterior negativity – similar to the triggering of anterior negativity by a clearly marked filler in English filler-gap sentences (cf. Kluender & Kutas, 1993a, 1993b). Thus, we argue that there is substantial similarity between the processing of English filler-gap constructions and Japanese gap-filler constructions.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the University of Illinois Research Board, by an NIMH postdoctoral training fellowship (T32 MH19554) at the University of Illinois, and by a University of Oregon Faculty Research Award to the first author. We thank Gary Dell, Kara Federmeier, Cindy Fisher, Tomoko Ishizuka, Andy Kehler, Robert Kluender, Nayoung Kwon, Brian Lin, Charles Lin, Edson Miyamoto, and Tamara Swaab for helpful discussion and suggestions, Yoko Ieuji, Eri Imura, Jinya Kurita, Kyung Sil Lee, Tom Shoemaker, and Michelle Wang for help with stimulus generation and data collection, and Laura Matzen and Katie McGee for editorial support.

Notes

¹More strictly speaking, Gibson (1998, 2000) concerns the number of new discourse referents between a filler and its gap. When a noun between a filler and its gap is reduced to a pronoun, processing difficulty is said to be reduced (cf. Gordon, Hendrick, & Johnson, 2001; Warren & Gibson, 2002).

²See the General Discussion section for the discussion of a recent ERP study on Korean RCs by Kwon et al. (2007a, 2007b).

³More recently, Ishizuka, Nakatani, and Gibson (2006) reported the opposite effect when Japanese SRs and ORs were presented in a discourse context.

⁴The sentences produced by participants in the norming study did not resemble the stimulus sentences in general. Participants did not use the same agents or patients (or reversed agents or patients) as those used in stimulus sentences with the corresponding verb, except in six sentences out of the 690 sentences examined (0.9%).

⁵We only included the frequency counts for nouns (without any case-marking particles) whose exact orthography (i.e., the particular combination of Chinese characters (kanji) and syllabic characters (kana)) was in the entry of Amano and Kondo (2000). This resulted in 70 data points for the nouns in the RC at sentence position 2, 68 data points for the head nouns at sentence position 4, and 70 data points for the main clause nouns at sentence position 6.

⁶The total number of participants actually run was 51. However, due to a hardware problem, data from the first 19 participants had to be discarded. Four other participants had additional recording problems with too much noise or drift, and their data were also discarded. In addition, another participant's data were accidentally deleted. Six participants from the 19 participants affected by the hardware problem came back for a second session 52–139 days (mean 113 days) after their original session. Exclusion of these six participants does not alter the patterns in the data but weakens the statistical power.