JAPANESE SENTENCE PROCESSING STRATEGIES: RECONSIDERING UNIVERSALITY AND SPECIFICITY

Joseph F. Kess ； Tadao Miyamoto

《Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series》 13期 (1999/04) Pp. 147-188

摘要

A number of far-reaching claims about the nature of Universal Grammar characterize the theoretical literature in linguistics over the past forty years, and they often carry the implicit expectation that language processing mechanisms must also be fundamentally the same. However, the psycholinguistics literature has often been equivocal about the universality of certain key tenets imported from linguistic theory to explanations of sentence processing. This paper examines psycholinguistic results from several revealing paradigms in the literature on English and Japanese, namely, sentence processing in left-branching vs. right-branching languages, the re-accessibility of empty categories, and syntactic comprehension impairments exhibited by Japanese aphasics. Collectively taken, these suggest that the informative strategies in natural language processing are language-specific. While there are a large number of undeniable similarities in the global strategies employed by the processing mechanism, the language-specific differences should make us reconsider our expectations that the processing mechanism manifests itself in one unique way. Theoretical claims about language structure are not always matched by the realities of processing, and our construction of a processing model should allow for variability rather than absolute uniformity. A cognitive science of the mind is more likely to find informative explanations in a limited range of generalized learning and processing principles, applied to language-specific processing strategies, than on a simple reductionist philosophy of science.