On the Influence of Prosody in Processing Relative Clauses in Japanese

Abstract

The present study investigates the effects of prosodic information when processing relative clauses in Japanese. We focused on Accent Reduction and Initial Lowering as prosodic cues, and conducted two decision-making experiments with auditory stimuli to verify how the above cues affect the processmg of relative clauses. Results from the experiments indicated that both Accent Reduction and Initial Lowermg influence syntactic processing in Japanese. In addition, the results show that not only accented words but also unaccented words play a role 111 detecting left clause boundary. These findings might suggest that prosodic influences may be observed in unaccented word sequences even in silent readings.