THE EFFECTS OF WORD-ORDER AND CASE MARKING INFORMATION ON THE PROCESSING pF JAPANESE

Three experiments investigated whether word order and case markers play a role in the native speaker's comprehension of Japanese. In Japanese, verbs are at the clause-final position and the order of words other than the verb appear to be flexible. The fact that verb information does not become available until the end of a clause suggests that other types of information may be used in processing the language. In the first experiment, 52 Japanese college students were presented with scrambled sentences and regular sentences and asked whether specific words had appeared in them, to investigate processing load. No increased difficulty in processing scrambled sentences was found. In experiment 2, 52 university students were given a lexical decision task. Results indicate that responses were not dependent on word order within the task sentence. The third experiment assessed whether case-marked arguments influenced sentence processing, and found the respondents sensitive to case marking. The results of the three experiments are more congruent with non-configurational structure than with configurational structure at the stage of pre-verbal processing in Japanese. Contains 32 references. (MSE) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. nguag