文理解における形容詞-名語句と動詞との結合過程

We assumed that the sentence representation was formed by the integration of the words schemata. In particular, the representation of the Japanese sentence which consists of the noun phrase and the verb is formed by integrating the representation of the noun phrase into the verb schema. For example, the representation of the typical noun phrase “akai ringo (red apple)" are integrated into the verb “taberu (eat)" in a similar fashion of the bare noun phrase “ringo (apple)." In contrast, the representation of the atypical noun phrase “chairoi ringo (brown apple)" is inconsistent with the default value of the schema's slot of the verb, so the integration process includes the dissolution of the inconsistency. In order to verify this hypothesis, we presented the subjects the noun phrases during 900 ms, then presented the verbs, and asked them to judge the sentence acceptability. We measured the judgment time as the time to integrate the noun phrases into verbs. As a result, the subjects needed longer time to integrate atypical noun phrases than bare noun phrases or typical noun phrases.