Between Reading Time and Clause Boundaries in Japanese—Wrap-up Effect in a Head-Final Language—

Abstract

This paper presents a contrastive analysis between reading time and clause boundary categories in the Japanese language in order to estimate text readability. We overlaid reading time data of BCCWJ EyeTrack, and clause boundary categories annotation on the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese. Statistical analysis based on the Bayesian linear mixed model shows that the reading time behaviours differ among the clause boundary categories. The result does not support the wrap-up effects of clause-final words. Another result we arrived at is that the predicate-argument relations facilitate the reading speed of native Japanese speakers.