出版社：Japan Science and Technology Information Aggregator, Electronic
摘要：Koizumi and Tamaoka (2004a) (KT hereafter) reported an experiment addressing the controversy surrounding the word order of double objects constructions in Japanese (Hoji, 1985; Matsuoka, 2003; Miyagawa, 1997). Although their conclusions may turn out to be correct, we argue that their conceptual justifications are problematic and more experimental work is needed, especially in relation to Matsuoka's proposal.We are particularly concerned with KT's claim that scrambled word orders take longer to process because their syntactic representations are more complex compared to canonical orders. Such metrics based on competence models fail to address critical issues in performance raised in the 1970's and later (Fodor et al., 1974). One problem is that in sentence processing we must consider incomplete sentences, which are often ambiguous, whereas syntactic theories have the luxury of dealing only with complete structures. Therefore, the mapping from competence theories to performance is not as straightforward as KT imply. In this commentary, we discuss KT's claims within an incremental model of sentence processing and consider the kinds of hurdles one must overcome before empirical results can distinguish between competing syntactic proposals.Despite our misgivings about some aspects of Kt's work, we believe that their effort to bring syntax and language processing together is the kind of interdisciplinary work needed to attain a detailed understanding of human cognition, and we hope that our comments will clarify some issues regarding their contribution.
