1987 Volume 6 Issue 1 Pages 1-10
The purpose of this paper was to investigate the human sentence processing in Japanese. For this purpose, we first examined the biases which occur when we interpret the structurally ambiguous sentences. Second, on the basis of certain regularities found in this study we proposed the following sentence parsing strategies: Local Attachment, Lexical Preference, Over-the-top Minimal Attachment, Bottom-up Attachment, Late Attachment, S-node Attachment, and Non-forced Locally-Minimal Attachment. These were intended to describe the workings of the factors which could be regarded as determining the biases. Then we worked out the relationships among these strategies to propose a partial model for syntactic processing procedures in Japanese. Finally, we discussed some aspects of the syntactic processing in the sentence understanding process and pointed out a few remaining problems the solution of which would promise some light in future research.
