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Grammatical objects in Japanese: object, scrambled object and topic-object

Author Affiliations

  • 1Mie University, Organization for the Development of Higher Education and Regional Human Resources, 1577 Kurimamachiya-cyo, Tsu-city, Mie 514-8507, Japan

Res. J.  Language and Literature Humanities, Volume 4, Issue (5), Pages 1-4, May,19 (2017)

Abstract

This psycholinguistic study examined native Japanese speakers’ reading of sentences that included three different types of grammatical objects, which were objects in the default position in a sentence, scrambled objects, and topic-objects. The results indicated that sentences with objects in the default position were read significantly faster than the other two. This outcome can be attributed to the word order, namely, SOV versus OSV. OSV sentences with scrambled objects or topic-objects were read slower than sentences in the default SOV order. In particular, participants’ reading significantly slowed when they were presented with subject nouns appearing after scrambled objects or topic-objects.

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