Sentence Processing in East Asian Languages

Sentence Processing in East Asian Languages Synopsis

Many researchers believe that a universal theory of how humans process language could possibly assist in the understanding of how the human brain works. For this reason research on sentence processing has been mainly centred on English and other Indo-European languages, East Asian languages like Chinese, Japanese and Korean have recieved little attention. This volume discusses how native speakers of East Asian languages process sentences in their native tongues. Although Chinese, Japanese and Korean share similar characteristics, this volume acknowledges abd discusses specific issues that are uniques to each language. Contributors explore the effects of homophones on lexical ambiguity in Chinese, investigate the impact of word order on structural ambiguity in Japanese and working memory in Korean. The findings contribute towards the construction of a universal theory of human language processing.