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 gapfilling difficulty manifests itself as larger centro-posterior positivity in ERP

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This paper examines the relationship between headedness and language processing and considers two strategies that potentially ease language comprehension and production. Both strategies allow a language to minimize the number of arguments in a given clause, either by reducing the number of overtly expressed arguments or by reducing the number of structurally required arguments. The first strategy consists of minimizing the number of OVERTLY EXPRESSED ARGUMENTS by using more pro-drop for two-place predicates (Pro-drop bias). According to the second strategy, a language gives preference to one-place predicates over two-place predicates, thus minimizing the number of STRUCTURAL ARGUMENTS (Intransitive bias). In order to investigate these strategies, we conducted a series of comparative corpus studies of SVO and SOV languages. Study 1 examined written texts of various genres and children's utterances in English and Japanese, while Study 2 examined narrative stories in English, Spanish, Japanese, and Turkish. The results for these studies showed that pro-drop was uniformly commoner with two-place predicates than with one-place predicates, regardless of the OV/VO distinction. Thus 2 the Pro-drop bias emerges as a universal economy principle for making utterances shorter. On the other hand, SOV languages showed a much stronger Intransitive bias than SVO languages.This finding suggests that SOV word order with all the constituents explicitly expressed is potentially harder to process; the dominance of one-place predicates is therefore a compensatory strategy in order to reduce the number of preverbal arguments. The overall pattern of results suggests that human languages utilize both general (Pro-drop bias) and headedness-orderspecific (Intransitive bias) strategies to facilitate processing. The results on headedness-orderspecific strategies are consistent with other researchers' findings on differential processing in head-final and non-head-final languages, for example, Yamashita & Chang's (2001) 'longbefore-short' parameterization. 1. INTRODUCTIONThis paper examines the relationship between headedness (as expressed in word order differences) and language processing. It is well-known that languages vary in their word order, and although linguists have different opinions over what criteria should be used to establish the 'basic word order' of a specific language, languages do differ in basic word order no matter how it is defined (cf. Haspelmath et al. 2008). Given this variation, one may wonder what kind of interaction there is between word order and language processing. In particular, do languages of different basic word orders show different processing strategies in terms of comprehension and production, and if so, how?There have been several suggestions that word order does influence processing. For instance, Yngve (1960) used the notion of the interaction between phrase structure weight and processing load to account for the strong preference in English to place long and complex elements later in the s...

Pronoun interpretation in English has been demonstrated to be sensitive to an interaction between grammatical and pragmatically driven factors. This study investigated the interpretation of pronouns in Japanese, which has both null and overt forms. Thirty-two native speakers of Japanese per experiment participated in passage completion studies with transfer-of-possession contexts (Experiment 1) or implicit causality contexts (Experiment 2), varying prompt type, aspect, and topic/nominative-marking of the previous subject. Two judges annotated reference and coherence relations in the completed passages. Japanese overt pronouns were revealed to pattern closely with English overt pronouns in their sensitivity to pragmatic factors, whereas null pronouns showed a mixed resilience to pragmatic factors. Topic-marking only showed marginal effects on reference in limited contexts. Despite different degrees of sensitivity to pragmatic factors, Japanese null and overt pronouns were both mostly subject-biased, casting doubt on the existence of a division of labor between the two forms. There was also an intrinsic link between reference and coherence relations throughout the experiments. We discuss the overall results in terms of language specificity and universality, the latter of which includes interactions between grammatical and pragmatic factors and the importance of discourse coherence in the interpretation of various pronouns across languages.

The processing of Japanese wh-questions was investigated using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Unlike in English or German, a wh-element in Japanese need not be displaced from its canonical position, but instead needs a corresponding Q(uestion)-particle to indicate its interrogative scope. We tested to see if there were any processing correlates specific to these features of Japanese wh-questions. Both mono-clausal and bi-clausal Japanese wh-questions elicited right-lateralized anterior negativity (RAN) between wh-words and corresponding Q-particles, relative to structurallyequivalent yes/no-question control conditions. These results suggest a reliable neural processing correlate of the dependency between wh-elements and Q-particles in Japanese, which is similar to effects of (left) anterior negativity seen between wh-fillers and gaps in English and German, but with a right-rather than left-lateralized distribution. It is suggested that wh-in-situ questions in Japanese are processed by the incremental formation of a long-distance dependency between wh-elements and their Q-particles, resulting in a working memory load for keeping track of the scopeless wh-elements.