On-Line Reflexive Resolution in Japanese Causative Garden Path Sentences

Abstract

This study explored the time course in which lexical information in causative verbs influences the identification of the antecedent of a Japanese reflexive pronoun, jibun. Since verb information specifies that the reflexive is bound to the indirect object despite its being ordinarily associated with the subject in Japanese sentences, this requires parsers to revise the syntactic representation they had previously formed. 42 students were required to identify quickly the antecedent when given a marker which was placed immediately after the reflexive, immediately at the end of the sentence following a verb, or 4 sec. after the end of the sentence. Correct identification was almost nil immediately after the reflexive, increasing to 20.3% correct immediately after the end of the sentence and 52.4% correct 4 sec. after the end of the sentence. This finding indicates that the verb-control information is not used immediately when parsing sentences in which the verb occurs at the end of the sentence. Thus, the products of moment-to-moment initial syntactic computation are not immediately mapped onto the final semantic interpretations.