Materials and Procedure

M aterials

The stimulus sentences consisted of a total of 8 sentences, whose phonological lengths were all fixed at 48 morae. All the sentences were also m ade up of fam iliar Jap an ese words and were chosen to pro d u ce differences in dependency distance.

Dependency distance is a simple measure of syntactic difficulty th at counts th e n u m b er of w ords betw een a word and its p aren t, in which each

intervening word is equally associated with a distance of 1. To illustrate how dependency distance is m easured, the dependency analysis of the sentence (6.1) is given below.

(6.1)

musuko no Noboru wal sengetsu no atama nil huransu no borudoo karal

son o f Noboru top last m onth o f beginning at France o f Bordeaux from

14 10

watashi nil budoubatake no ehagaki

I to vineyard o f postcard

yokoshi ta. (20 words)

to send past

The total dependency distance: 34 (= 14+10+6+4) The average dependency distance: 1.7 (=34/20 words)

‘My son Noboru sent me a postcard of a vineyard from Bordeaux in France at the beginning of last month.’

N.B. • Grammatical relations: s = subject; o = object; c = complement; a = adjunct • Word classes: For nouns, verbs, adverbs, numeral nouns and classifiers,

translated words are given.

Particles are sbj (= subject), top (= topic), obj (= object) and ptc (= other types of particles).

Postpositional particles are translated into English. Auxiliary verbs are past, causative, passive, desiderative, negative and hearsay.

• I shows a boundary between phrases which depend directly on the main or embedded verb, so that they can be arranged in any order within the clause without a significant change in meaning.

The dependency distance of (6.1) is m easured by counting the num ber of words between a dependent and its parent. Thus, a dependent which is adjacent to its parent enjoys the minimum distance, zero. The sentential-root is also assumed to be associated with no distance.

As can be seen from (6.1) above, in order to calculate the total distance, there are four words to be considered which are separated from their parent,

yo ko sh i ‘to send':

• the two direction particles ni ‘to ’ and kara ‘from ’ • the place particle n i ‘a t’

• the topic particle wa.

First, the direction particle n i is separated by four words from its parent

yokoshi, which results in a distance of 4. Second, there are two more words

watashi ‘I’ and ni ‘to ’ in addition to the four words explained above separating the place particle kara from its parent, resulting in a distance of 6. Third, on top of these six separating words above, four m ore words intervene between the dependent ni ‘a t’ and its parent verb y o ko sh i ‘to send’, which corresponds to its distance of 10. Finally, the topic m arker wa is separated from its parent y o ko sh i ‘to send’ by fourteen words, ten words described above plus four additional words, so the particle wa is associated with a distance of 14.

The total dependency distance for a sentence is given by summing all the distances incurred in the sentence, so the total distance for (6.1) is calculated by adding up the four distances depicted above, resulting in the total distance of 34. The average dependency distance for a sentence is gained by dividing its total distance by the num ber of words in the sentence. Hence, the average distance for (6.1) is 1.7, corresponding to the total distance, 34 divided by the total num ber of words in (6.1), 20.

In the following tables 6.1 and 6.2, the characteristics and the dependency distance for all the sentences utilised in the experiments are sum m arised. As can be seen from the tables below, there are only two exem plar stimuli for each type of sentence, so the results will not be conclusive. The bare sentences and their dependency analyses will be provided in the relevant sections below.

Table 6.1 Characteristics for all the sentences in Experiments 2 and 3

experiments pairs characteristics

Experiment 2: clause la+lb 2a+2b

A noun is modified by a long relative clause. Experiment 3: max-min 3a+3b

4a+4b

2 nouns are modified by the same number of morphemes.

N.B. 'a' and ‘b’ prefixed by the same number are a minimal pair.

‘a’ has an unmarked word order, while ‘b’ is a reordered version of ‘a’.

Table 6.2 Dependency distance for all the sentences in Experiments 2 and 3

experiments no. w o distance

ttl ave Experiment 2: clause la 48 23 4 16 0.695 lb 48 23 4 55 2.391 2a 48 23 4 16 0.695 2b 48 23 4 52 2.260 Experiment 3: max-min 3a 48 20 2 9 0.45 3b 48 20 2 9 0.45 4a 48 20 3 14 0.7 4b 48 20 3 14 0.7 N.B. p, = number of morae w = number of words

a = number of syntactic chunks whose final words are dependents of either the main or the embedded verb

distance = dependency distance ttl = total dependency distance ave = average dependency distance

Procedure

Experiments 2 and 3 were administered in July 1998 up to January 1999. A total of 84 native Japanese individuals who had at least a high-school education participated in the experiments. Subject groups A, B and C involved 3 6 ,3 8

and 10 subjects respectively. Of the 84 subjects, 74 who constituted Groups A an d B were students at the Institute of International Education in London, and Group C made up of the rest of 10 subjects were my personal acquaintances; all the subjects had an average age of 23 years (range 18 - 37).

Each subject group was tested twice with an interval of 1 week; in the first week, the sentences chosen from one of the minimal pairs were used, and th eir corresponding sentences in the second week. All the subjects in each group who were tested in the first week turned up on the second week as well.

It is im portant to recognise the possibility of “long-term ” Hebb effects (Hebb 1961) from Week 1 to Week 2 whereby perform ance would improve in Week 2 as a result of experience of the same words and lexical chunks in Week 1. To some extent these effects were controlled by counterbalancing the o rd er of presentation, but the sentences in Experiment 3 were not counterbalanced so the results have to be interpreted with caution.

The sentences and their order of presentation introduced for each subject group are displayed in Table 6.3 below. Although Group A were given six sentences in total, four of which were different types, and 5 different types of sentences in all were tested on Groups B and C in each week, the ones which are not reported in this chapter due to experim ental design flaws are om itted in the table.

Table 6.3 Order of the presentation of the sentences

Subject Group A Subject Group B Subject Group C

week 1 no. sort no. sort no. sort

2. 2b clause

5. la clause 4a max-min 4b max-min

6. 3b max-min

week 2 no. sort no. sort no. sort

2. lb clause

5. 2a clause 4b max-min 4a max-min

6. 3a max-min

Table 6.3 above shows which subjects participated in which experim ents; Subjects belonging to Group A took part in the experiments laid out in the left column, i.e. Experiments 2 (clause) and 3 (max-min). Subject groups B and C participated Experiment 3 (max-min) in the middle and right columns respectively.

Subjects in a group of 9 to 12 were tested on the immediate recall task - the same one employed in Experiment 1 - where they were required to write down each sentence as soon as I had read it out, and were rem inded to aim only for accuracy of recall. The average rate of presentation was 0.15 seconds p er mora. For each sentence, approximately one m ora of pause was placed a fte r each syntactic chunk, which is m arked by a vertical line in the syntactic analysis of each sentence. All the sequences were read only once in a flat fashion with standard Japanese pitch accent and enough time was provided after the presentation of each sentence so th at all the subjects could complete their reproduction of the sentence. The subjects were allowed to use any Japanese scripts, hiragana, katakana or kanji, and also Arabic num erals for digits.

The stimulus sentences were scored on the basis of the words in the materials, w hereby each word was scored either as a success or as a failure; for each success, 1 point was given, and for a failure, zero. A reproduction of a word was a success if it was either a verbatim copy, a synonym o r abbreviation of the original, or a deviation which could be due to m ishearing. Any o th er recall was scored as a failure. Displaced or reversed words were counted so th at a sentence containing such items would gain as m any successes as possible.