Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanities, Kyushu University
Abstract
A dependency establishment process is a successive procedure that readers use to determine the syntactic dependency between two or more elements. This study investigates when and how the readers make a decision on such dependency during on-line sentence processing, especially when they read sentences including numeral quantifiers in Japanese. In Japanese, a numeral quantifier and its host-NP can appear relatively freely in a sentence. To comprehend the sentence, however, readers must determine the relationship between the two elements. Two ERP experiments were conducted and the results indicated that the dependency establishment process consists of three sub-processes: (i) Judgment to start the integration process, (ii) Holding an unintegrated element, and (iii) Integration of the two elements
