Yoshida, Masaya
Associate Professor
Humanities
Short biography
Research interests
Theories of sentence processing have been assuming syntactic structure building, or parsing, as one of the crucial components in the mechanism of sentence comprehension. In this view, upon receiving the bottom-up input (e.g., words), the comprehender builds a partial sentence structure, integrates each successive bottom-up input into the currently built partial parse, and achieves semantic representation. Thus, in the traditional views, it is expected that grammatical structural constraints constrain the time-course of online sentence comprehension. Many recent studies of sentence processing, on the other hand, have been suggesting that comprehenders do not necessarily build fully articulated grammatical structures, and achieving the meaning of the sentence is not always based on grammatical structures. Thus, these studies argue that psycholinguistic phenomena are to be explained with independent principles of cognitive processes, not with language-specific principles and mechanisms. Against this background, in the past five years, I have been investigating to what extent the process of online sentence comprehension is sensitive to grammatical structural constraints.
Specifically, I have been investigating the following empirical domains: Anaphora Resolution, Ellipsis resolution, and Agreement, from the perspective of both experimental psycholinguistics and formal syntax. The studies I have conducted have been showing that the mechanism of sentence processing builds rich and sophisticated hierarchical syntactic structures during online processing, and the time-course of online processing is tightly constrained by syntactic structural constraints.