The interrelationships among strategies for sentence comprehension

Abstract

The present study was designed to investigate interrelationships among the following three strategies for sentence comprehension: Word order strategy, postposition strategy and semantic strategy. A 2×2×2 factorial design was employed. The three within-subject variables were: Word order of the sentence (SOV or OSV), the presence or absence of postpositions, and the type of verb (human-object or non-human-object). The subject's task was to make rapid judgements about whether the stimulus sentence was acceptable or unacceptable. Main results were as follows: (a) Reaction time was longer for sentences with postpositions than for sentences without postpositions. (b) Reaction time was longer for OSV than for SOV except in the case of human-object sentences without postpositions. These findings were interpreted as evidence that the three processing strategies were used in sentence comprehension, and a tentative model of sentence comprehension composed of the three strategies was proposed. © 1983, The Japanese Psychological Association. All rights reserved.