Abstract
This paper describes three psycholinguistic experiments on anaphoric resolution during sentence comprehension in Japanese. In Japanese language, there is a postposition “wa” which signifies “topic” and “ga” which signifies “(grammatical) subject”. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of the difference between “wa” and “ga” to assign ambiguous pronouns. In a self-paced reading paradigm, reading times were longer subject noun phrase than object noun phrase, irrespective of the difference of postposition, and there were more assignment to the topic noun phrase (Topic-NP: “NP+wa”) than subject noun phase (Subject-NP: “NP+ga”). In a probe recognition task, reaction times (RTs) were faster subject (S-probe) than object (O-probe), and RTs for S-probe were faster Topic-NP sentence than Subject-NP sentence. Overall, the influence of topic was observed, thus suggesting that the topic assignment strategy (TAS) were utilized during the assignment of pronouns in Japanese. Experiment 2 investigated the influence of another heuristic strategies which have been proposed to account for the assignment of pronouns in sentences in English: the subject assignment strategy (SAS) and the parallel function strategy (PFS). Furthermore, Experiment 3 investigated to distinguish between the heuristic strategies: TAS, SAS, and PFS. In both Experiment 2 and 3, there was a strong preference assigning a pronoun to the preceding Topic-NP, thus showing TAS was predominantly used over other heuristic strategies. These findings support that Japanese has a linguistic nature of a topic prominent language.
