Japanese learners experience less difficulty with English garden-path sentences than native speakers by using subcategorization information of a verb

摘要

This study investigates the difference in processing structurally ambiguous (so-called 'garden-path') sentences in English between Japanese learner of English and native English speakers. The sentences tested in the experiment either contained a verb that almost always takes a direct object (transitive verb) or one that does not (intransitive verb). We measured reading time for individual words using self-paced reading task. Past research showed that native English speakers initially analyze a noun phrase that directly follows a verb as its direct object and experience processing difficulty on encountering disambiguating information regardless of the type of the verb. Our results with Japanese learners of English revealed greater processing difficulty at the disambiguating main verb when the subordinate clause had a transitive verb than when it had an intransitive verb. Further more, this tendency increased with the participants who answered more accurately to the comprehension questions, suggesting that Japanese learners of English, especially those who parse the sentences correctly, rely heavily on the grammatical knowledge of individual verbs to guide their initial analysis.