This article presents the contrastive analysis between reading time and syntactic/semantic categories in Japanese. We overlaid the reading time annotation BCCWJEyeTrack and a syntactic/semantic category information annotation on the ‘Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese’. Statistical analysis based on a mixed linear model showed that verbal phrase tends to be shorter reading time than adjective,adverbial phrases or nominal phrases in the syntactic categories. Relation phrases are also shorter than other phrases in the semantic categories. The results suggest that the number of preceding phrases associated with the input facilitates the reading process,leading to the reduction in the gaze duration.
