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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.

Complex predicates, by definition, behave like representationally ''reduced'' predicates, as extensively discussed in the syntax literature. This article reports the results from an experimental study using a type of complex predicate in Japanese (the V-te V predicate), testing how people process this type of complex ''restructured'' predicate in real time. Because of the properties of the V-te V predicate, it was possible to compare restructured predicates with nonrestructured ones, keeping such factors as event composition, Case licensing, and lexical choice constant. The results of the experiment suggest that the tested restructured predicates involve a single array of predicate-argument association rather than two separate arrays, even though they contain two verbs. The results also revealed that syntactically complex ditransitive predicates are processed with the same ease as lexical ditransitives.

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The present article critically reviews Zubizarreta and Oh (henceforth, Z&O)'s (2007) work, which proposes novel syntactic treatments of the well-known "manner-motion conflation" parameter among languages such as Korean, Germanic, and Romance (Talmy (1985)) and of a serial-verb construction parameter that explains the difference between Edo and Korean. Because there has been a long tradition of lexicalist studies on these matters (Talmy (1985), Pinker (1989), Kageyama (1993), Rappaport Hovav and Levin (1998), among others), Z&O's work is specifically examined to see if their approach is advantageous over the lexicalist approach in terms of the predictability of the parameter setting. It is shown in the present article that Z&O's approach is actually not as explanatory as they argue-at least it is hard to conclude that their approach has been proven better.