著者

柴田 寛 杉山 磨哉 鈴木 美穂 金 情浩 行場 次朗 小泉 政利

出版者

日本認知科学会

雑誌

認知科学 (ISSN:13417924)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.13, no.3, pp.301-315, 2006 (Released:2008-11-13)

参考文献数

34

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According to a widely held view, the object-subject-verb word order in Japanese is derived from the subject-object-verb word order by shifting the object to the sentence-initial position. This movement of the object, called scrambling, is hypothesized to leave “a trace” in the original object position (Saito, 1985). With regard to this view, during online sentence processing, a fronted object must be associated with its trace (filler-driven parsing). If a human actually processes scrambled sentences by filler-driven parsing, it is assumed that an object is reactivated and the processing load increases at the trace position. Although many psycholinguistic studies have been conducted in order to investigate the processing of a trace at the trace position, few studies have focused on processing around the trace positions. In the present study, by using a cross-modal lexical priming (CMLP) task that is capable of measuring the processing load and the activation level of an object at arbitrary positions, we investigated the processing around the trace positions in Japanese clause-internal scrambled sentences. In this study, in order to correct the problem encountered in the preceding study (Nakano et al., 2002) using the CMLP task, we did not measure the direct priming effect; however, we measured the indirect priming effect as a method of investigating the activation level of an object. When the data of all the participants were analyzed together, the increases in the processing load and the reactivation of an object around the trace position were not revealed. However, because of the difficulty of the CMLP task, the previous study (Nakano et al., 2002) presented the reactivation of an object at the trace position for participants who responded to lexical decisions quickly and possessed a high working memory capacity. Therefore, the participants in this study were divided into fast and slow groups based on their lexical decision latencies during the task. The results that reflect the filler-driven parsing were revealed only for the fast group. In the fast group, the processing load at the trace position was found to exceed the load at the position preceding and following the trace position. Further analyses of the results showed that the activation level of an object increased only at the trace position.