This dissertation features a relative clause island, whose status has been known to differ significantly across languages and extraction types. By conducting a series of acceptability judgment experiments with human participants, as well as measuring token-by-token surprisal values among large language models, I demonstrate the following: First,…

Comprehenders generate expectations about upcoming lexical items in language processing using various types of contextual information. However, a number of studies have shown that argument roles do not impact neural and behavioral prediction measures. Despite these robust findings, some prior studies have suggested that lexical prediction might be…

The present study investigated the canonical position of instrumental and locative adverbial phrases in both Japanese sentences and noun phrases to determine whether the canonical positions are parallel. A series of sentence/phrase decision tasks were used to compare sentences with different word-orders, including sentences with SA"dv"OV…

This study investigated the relative effects of four forms of task preparation on L2 speech production. One hundred forty-four Japanese speakers of English completed an oral opinion task after 10 minutes of preparation. The same task repetition condition involved four iterations of the same pedagogic task (same procedures, same content), the…

This study examines whether second language (L2) learners predict upcoming language prior to the verb in Japanese. Taking the dependency involving negative polarity adverbs -- "zenzen" 'at all' and "amari" '(not) very' -- as a test case, this study examined whether Japanese native speakers and L2 learners of Japanese, aided by…

When acquiring a second language, learners must become able to perceive the difference between novel sounds ("discrimination") and also associate strings of sounds with distinct vocabulary items ("lexical encoding"). Recent research has questioned whether discrimination is a sufficient or necessary condition for encoding, and…

The current study examined the extent to which cognitive fluency (CF) contributes to utterance fluency (UF) at the level of constructs. A total of 128 Japanese-speaking learners of English completed four speaking tasks--argumentative task, picture narrative task, reading-to-speaking task, and reading-while-listening-to-speaking task--and a battery…

Research on pre-task planning to date has mainly focused on task performance. However, the effects of planning are contingent on what learners actually do during planning time. One important factor that may determine the quality and usefulness of planning is whether it is done in the first language (L1) or the second language (L2). This research…

Research on communication strategies (CSs) has been drawing much attention in the area of psycholinguistics and applied linguistics. This study examined if triggering instruction can accelerate the cognitive aspects of CSs transference from L1 to L2. In the first part of the experiment, all participants, twenty-one Japanese university students,…

Current second language (L2) listening research has lacked detailed accounts of L2 listeners' difficulties comprehending texts comprising orthographically known lexis. In the current study, 15 first language (L1) Japanese English language learners of three English proficiency levels listened to sentences and a narrative text. A two-task diagnostic…

Studies that have measured pragmatic fluency in the form of planning time and speech rate, as indicators of processing ability, have confirmed that learners' processing ability and pragmatic knowledge are independent from each other. The present study is a longitudinal, developmental investigation which investigates whether the study abroad stay…

This study investigated the relationship between a metaphor-based approach to teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) and involvement of the brain's right hemisphere. Specifically, it examined learners' understanding of three levels of sureness associated with different expressions in English -- those that are "certain,"…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role and nature of phonology in silent reading of Japanese sentences. An experiment was conducted using a Japanese sentence acceptability judgment task. One important finding was that participants more rapidly rejected homophonic sentences in which one two-kanji compound word was replaced by its…

This lexical decision eye-tracking study investigated whether horizontal and vertical readings elicit comparable behavioral patterns and whether reading directions modulate lexical processes. Response times and eye movements were recorded during a lexical decision task with Japanese bimorphemic compound words presented vertically. The data were…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…