Parallelism Between Sentence Structure and Nominal Phrases in Japanese: Evidence from Scrambled Instrumental and Locative Adverbial Phrases.

The present study investigated the canonical position of instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in both Japanese sentences and noun phrases to determine whether the canonical positions are parallel. A series of sentence/phrase decision tasks were used to compare sentences with different word-orders, including sentences with SAdvOV (S is subject phrase, Adv adverb, O object phrase and V verb), AdvSOV, SAdvOV and SOAdvV word orders. SAdvOV word order was found to be the most quickly processed, for both instrumental adverbial (Experiment 1) and locative adverbial phrases (Experiment 2).

Correction: Ambiguity in the processing of Mandarin Chinese relative clauses: One factor cannot explain it all.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Ambiguity in the processing of Mandarin Chinese relative clauses: One factor cannot explain it all.

This study addresses the question of whether native Mandarin Chinese speakers process and comprehend subject-extracted relative clauses (SRC) more readily than object-extracted relative clauses (ORC) in Mandarin Chinese. Presently, this has been a hotly debated issue, with various studies producing contrasting results. Using two eye-tracking experiments with ambiguous and unambiguous RCs, this study shows that both ORCs and SRCs have different processing requirements depending on the locus and time course during reading.