Abstract
The present study investigates the effects of case marking information on processing an object NP in Japanese. In Japanese, there are two kinds of case markers that are assigned to an object NP, one is a dative case marker “ni”, the other is an accusative case marker “o”, and it is specified for each verb which case marker is assigned to an object NP. We conducted two experiments to verify whether the parser is sensitive to the difference in case markers in object NPs. Results from the experiments show two findings: (i) the parser processes object NPs in different ways depending on the case marker, (ii) based on the difference in the case markers of object NPs, the parser predicts what kind of element is input next. As for the mechanism of the parser, the present results are compatible with the model in which NPs in Japanese are associated with a parsing tree incrementally before verb information becomes available, and give a detailed explanation of how it processes the NPs with local information at the stage of preverbal processing.
