Functionally Incremental Sentence Processing and Reanalysis Difficulty in Head-Final Agglutinative Language

This paper quantitatively expresses the degrees of processing difficulties caused by syntactically different reanalyses in Japanese sentences by questionnaire and self-paced reading experiments with non-syntactic factors strictly controlled. We propose the functionally incremental processing for Japanese sentences and we demonstrate that our hypothesis is effective to explain the degree of the processing difficulty in various sentence types. The peculiarity of Japanese processing and the relevance of our results to the human sentence processing model are discussed.