坂本 勉 SAKAMOTO Tsutomu
Vol.2, No.2 (May 1995), pp.77-90. Received 1994/7/1, accepted 1995/2/9.
The experimental results on Japanese sentence processing reported here show a constant preference for the object filler as a filler in both Subject-Object word order and Object-Subject word order. On the standard assumption that scrambling of word order leaves a trace, this consistency of object filler preference suggests that the trace is recognized by the processor as a legitimate filler. Thus, the findings here do not support the non-transparency hypothesis, which is based on the following two claims: (i) the parser uses a strategy that depends on recency (the "Most Recent Filler, MRF" strategy) and (ii) the parser does not accept an empty category as the filler for another empty category (the "Lexical Filler Only, LFO" hypothesis). Rather, the findings are compatible with the transparency hypothesis, which assumes that the parser can make use of all the information available from the grammar. Furthermore, the results presented here support the hypothesis that the language module is independent of general inference mechanisms.