The effect of negative concord adverb in processing left clause boundary of Japanese complex sentences
In the research field of sentence processing, many researchers have reported experimental results that support the hypothesis of incremental processing, even in a head final language like Japanese, similar to head initial languages like English. This study examined the effect of negative concord adverbs (NCAs) in temporarily locating the left clause boundaries of complex sentences. The experiment results showed that the sentence processor preferentially establishes the dependency between the negative concord adverb and negative suffix over the dependency between the argument and its predicate. Moreover, to construct the NCA suffix relationship, the sentence processor could discard the argument predicate relationship that has been established before, and could change the location of the left clause boundary. "Prediction" Reverses the Processing Difficulty of Subject and Object Relative Clauses in Japanese