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The Complexity of Nested Structures in Japanese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Maria Babyonyshev  and
Edward Gibson
Maria Babyonyshev*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Edward Gibson*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
*
Babyonyshev, Dept. of Linguistics, Harvard University, Boylston Hall, Rm. 316, Cambridge, MA 02138 [babyonys@mit.edu]
Gibson, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, NE 20-459, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139 [gibson@psyche.mit.edu]
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Abstract

This article presents two questionnaire experiments that investigate the processing complexity of a variety of nested constructions in Japanese. The first experiment demonstrated that embedded structures containing a direct object NP in the most embedded clause were more complex than comparable nested structures that lacked an object NP in the most embedded clause. The second experiment demonstrated that a construction consisting of a relative clause embedded within a sentential complement is less complex than the reverse embedding, consisting of sentential complement embedded within a relative clause. These results are discussed in terms of the syntactic prediction locality theory (Gibson 1998).

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 75 , Issue 3 , September 1999 , pp. 423 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Linguistic Society of America

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