Disfluency in the Production of Long-before-short Order: Analysis of Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese

摘要

The Short-before-long tendency in English, a head-initial language with rigid word-order, has been explained in terms of the ease of production. In producing sentences incrementally, it is easier and therefore more economical to say a short phrase ahead of a long phrase for speakers of English. The current study tested whether the Long-before-short tendency in Japanese is also driven by efficiency of the production load. The occurrences of production difficulty, as reflected in disfluencies in a spoken corpus (the Corpus of Spontaneous Japanese), were measured. The results showed that the frequency of disfluency markers (fillers and errors) in Long-before-short sentences did not differ from that of the Short-before-long sentences. Furthermore, disfluency markers were more likely to occur before long phrases than short phrases overall. The results suggest that producing long phrases in Japanese is difficult, and producing sentences in the Long-before-short order does not reduce the production load. Alternative accounts of length preference in Japanese, based on the characteristics of the language, are discussed.