Effects of punctuation on the processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences in Japanese

Abstract

This study explored the effects of comma insertion on the processing of garden path sentences in Japanese. In two experiments, participants read relative clause sentences containing two ambiguities: single versus relative clause and earlyopening (EO) versus late-opening (LO) left clause boundaries. EO sentences were presented with or without a comma compatible with an EO boundary in Experiment 1 and, in Experiment 2, with an LO boundary. The results showed that the comma, whether compatible or incompatible with the correct clause boundary, decreased reading time for the relative clause's head noun, indicating that a comma helps readers avoid or recover from garden paths caused by relative clause structures. Conversely, a comma incompatible with a clause boundary increased processing costs of second ambiguity resolution (EO vs. LO). We concluded that punctuation affects processing of temporary ambiguity in Japanese as in languages with stricter punctuation rules; furthermore, readers depend strongly on punctuation for online processing of whole sentence structures. We also discuss the relationship between punctuation and (implicit) prosody.

Processing punctuation and word changes in different editions of prose fiction

“…Further research has investigated how punctuation at sentence and clause boundaries interacts with the type of clause, as well as with intonation patterns (Hirotani et al, 2006). Other work has focused on the influence of punctuation on the resolution of syntactic ambiguity (Niikuni & Muramoto, 2014), or in leading readers to expect a complex rather than simple sentence structure (Niikuni, Iwasaki & Muramoto, 2015). However, such studies have not looked at the impact of changes in sentence internal punctuation, such as changes from a comma to a colon, nor was the focus on whether readers notice changes to already well punctuated sentences.…”

Disentangling Language Disorder and Bilingualism in Children with Developmental Language Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorder: Evidence from Writing

“…letter knowledge, spelling) skills, very little attention has been paid to the direct empirical investigation of prosodic patterns underlying the use of punctuation in bilingual children’s written texts. There are studies with monolingual adults that have mainly focused on the potent disambiguating role that punctuation may play in the processing of locally ambiguous sentences using self-paced reading paradigms (Drury et al, 2016 ; Niikuni & Muramoto, 2014 ; Steinhauer & Friederici, 2001 ). These studies converge to show that punctuation marks (especially commas) play a critical role in cueing types of parsing decision at particular points in sentences with local processing difficulty; in a sense, they guide readers through surface text organization by facilitating written text chunking into coherent blocks and pulling the interpretation of separate punctuation-marked blocks towards a globally coherent parse.…”

Predicting native Chinese readers’ perception of sentence boundaries in written Chinese texts

“…Psycholinguistic research on Chinese sentence boundary perception has so far focused on prosodic and phonological boundaries in spoken Chinese as well (Lai et al, 2016). More broadly, a body of theoretical and experimental studies have explored the prosodic, syntactic, and semantic functions of punctuation in spoken or written texts and the ways in which punctuation may affect sentence processing and comprehension (e.g., Baron, 2001;Heggie & Wade-Woolley, 2018;Hirotani et al, 2006;Liu et al, 2010;Niikuni & Muramoto, 2014;Pynte & Kennedy, 2007;Scholes & Willis, 1990;Schou, 2007). Some researchers have also profiled the frequency distribution of punctuation marks (e.g., Kulig et al, 2017;Sun & Wang, 2019) and developed algorithms for automatic text punctuation (e.g., Christensen et al, 2001;Liu et al, 2006).…”