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Applied Linguistics 1997 18(4):508-536; doi:10.1093/applin/18.4.508
© 1997 by Oxford University Press
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Articles

Individual Variation in a Japanese Sentence Comprehension Task: Form, Functions, and Strategies

YOSHINORI SASAKI

University of New South Wales

This article reports on follow-up analyses of Sasaki's (in press) competition experiment study of Japanese sentence comprehension strategies. Individual-based analyses are contrasted with group statistics which were reported earlier.

A competition experiment was conducted to investigate the double-object active and transitive causative sentence processing strategies by English-speaking learners of Japanese (JFL learners), and how immediate error feedback affects them. Six native Japanese speakers and nine JFL learners participated in the study. The participants were required to identify the agents of the main lexical verb (‘doers’) in a series of Japanese sentences, each consisting of one verb and three noun phrases, in which word order and case-marking cues either competed or were consistent with each other (These were all grammatical sentences i.e they were morphosyntacttcally well formed. Also, The sentences were all semantically interpretable ) In the first (pre-test) and last (post-test) parts of the study participants received no feedback as to the accuracy of their responses, whereas in the middle part they received immediate feedback. The stimulus sentences were such that a listener could determine the semantic role of noun phrases (actor, causer, or recipient) only by taking into consideration both the case markers and the verb‘s voice (active us causative).

The analyses indicated tremendous individual differences within each group. Some learners demonstrated an evident word order bias, and a subset of the native Japanese revealed an even stronger word order dependency than the learners, to such an extent that they were outperformed by learners in the accuracy in interpreting non-canonical sentences

The results are explained in terms of the working memory constraint, and directions of further research are discussed.


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