Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Vol. 27, No.

4, 1998

Processing and Learning of Japanese DoubleObject Active and Causative Sentences: An Error-Feedback Paradigm
Yoshinori Sasaki1,2

Do native speakers always outperform second-language (L2) learners in terms of speech processing accuracy? Surprisingly, the answer to this seemingly obvious question is no according to the study reported here. Indeed, native speakers sometimes make more errors than learners in interpreting their own first-language (L1) speech. In this competition experiment of the double-object active and transitive causative sentence processing strategies, six native Japanese speakers and nine English-speaking learners of Japanese participated. The participants were required to identify the agents of the main lexical verb ("doers") of a series of Japanese sentences, each consisting of one verb and three noun phrases, in which word order and case-marking cues either competed or were consistent with each other. In the first (pretest) and last (posttest) parts of the study, participants received no feedback about the accuracy of their responses, whereas in the middle part they received immediate feedback. The stimulus sentences were such that a listener could determine the semantic role of noun phrases (actor, causer, or recipient) only by taking into consideration both the case markers and the verbs voice (active vs. causative). Learners of Japanese as a second language (JFLs) demonstrated an evident word order bias. Native Japanese speakers also made surprisingly numerous errors, by imI would like to express my gratitude for comments on earlier versions of this article by the reviewer of Journal of Psycholinguistic Research and its editor R. Rieber, and by Tamar Kaplan, Chihiro Kinoshita-Thomson, Brian MacWhinney, Akira Miyake, and Marcus Taft. I would also like to express my gratitud fort voluntary participation of the experiment subjects, who were also my students. Daniel Lepetit shared his phonetics expertise with me in the process of material preparation. I also acknowledge that I had the opportunity to develop this research plan while I spent the summer of 1993 at the University of Illinois, under the sponsorship of Robert Hart. 1 University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia 2 Address all correspondence to Yoshinori Sasaki, University of New South Wales, School of Asian Business & Language Studies, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
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0090-6905/98/0700-0453$ 15.00/0 1998 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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posing the canonical case-marker sequence in reconstructing noncanonical sentences. Indeed some of the native Japanese revealed an even stronger word order bias than the learners, and they committed more errors than learners in interpreting noncanonical word order sentences. The results are explained in terms of the working memory constraint. Directions of further research are discussed.

INTRODUCTION Do native speakers always outperform second-language (L2) learners in terms of speech processing accuracy? Surprisingly, the answer to this seemingly obvious question is no according to the study to be reported here: Native speakers may commit more errors than learners in a sentence interpretation task, when subtle condition parameters are set in a certain way. This study applied the competition model (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989) to analyze how native English speakers learn the form-function mapping of Japanese double-object and causative sentences. According to this model, language processing is essentially the competition and/or convergence of multiple cues for a limited number of channels. It claims that semantic, grammatical,3 and phonological cues are processed concurrently. Earlier competition studies have shown that native speakers of different languages interpret sentences by paying their primary attention to different aspects (cues) of given speech, and this first-language (LI) comprehension strategy often affects their L2 processing in a complex manner. When several cues are in competition regarding the interpretation of speech (a conflict sentence), the relative strength of the cues determines the interpretation a listener/reader eventually gives. For example, A fence damages a donkey provides a competition between lexical-semantic and word order cues. Japanese Word Order and Case-Marking Systems Simple Transitive Sentences In a Japanese sentence, a noun is marked for thematic roles (e.g., subject, object) by the subsequent case marking postpositions: O usually marks its preceding noun for object, and ga typically is the subject marker. Sasaki (1994b) presented a series of Japanese word strings to Englishspeaking learners and native speakers of Japanese, in which three types of cues (word order, case markers, noun animacy) were consistent or divergent regarding the sentence interpretations they each suggested. The results in3

The terms grammar and morphosyntax are used interchangeably in this article.

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dicated that native Japanese speakers characteristically relied heavily on case-marking cues in interpreting Japanese simple transitive sentences, and native English learners of Japanese assimilated this case-marker sensitivity fairly promptly: Even beginning learners relied on case markers to a much greater extent than on Japanese canonical subject-object-verb (SOV) word order schema. Double-Object and Causative Sentences However, it may be premature to conclude that the approximation of native-like case-marker-referenced strategies is always a smooth process: As Fig. 1 illustrates, Sasaki's (1994b) set of stimulus materials maintained the one-to-one correspondence between the case-marker form and the semantic role function (a noun followed by ga is always agent/experiencer; a noun followed by o is always patient). This easy-to-process feature should facilitate acquisition, as Slobin (1979) predicted that: Universal 3: The closer a grammatical system adheres to one-to-one mapping between semantic elements and surface elements, the earlier it will be acquired (p. 109) On the other hand, there are instances where such simple relations no longer hold. Japanese double-object active and transitive causative sentences collectively provide such an instance (see Fig. 2). The following active and causative sentences, which are phonologically identical except for the final verb (active kaku vs. causative kakaseru), each expresses a totally different propositional meaning: (4-1) Naomi ga Naomi SBJ
(5-1) Naomi ga

Ken ni Ken I-OBJ

Ken ni

tegami letter
tegami

o D-OBJ
o

kaku. to write
kakaseru.

(Naomi writes a letter to Ken.) Naomi SBJ Ken I-OBJ letter D-OBJ to make write

(Naomi makes/lets Ken write a letter.) Whereas Naomi marked by subject marker ga is the writer of a letter (=doer) in the first, double-object active sentence (4-1), the equivalent phrase in the second, causative sentence (5-1) denotes a causer, and Ken, marked by ni, is the one who was made to write a letter (causee = doer). In other words, it is possible to assign correct semantic roles to these noun phrases only by taking into consideration both their case markers and the verb form (active vs. causative). The processing is further complicated when the noun phrases are scrambled: Whereas (4-1) and (5-1) each provide basic word orders of Japanese double-object active and causative constructions (i.e., N-ga N-HZ N-o V)

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Fig. 1. Form-function mapping of Japanese simple transitive sentences.

Fig. 2. Form-function mapping of Japanese double-object and causative sentences.

which are presented in elementary Japanese textbooks (e.g., Nagara, 1990), it is possible to order the noun phrases in different orders without changing the propositional meaning.4 For examples, the following five sentences convey the same semantic information as (4-1), each with different pragmatic emphases: (4-2) Naomi (4-3) Ken (4-4) Ken
4

ga ni ni

tegami Naomi tegami

o ga o

Ken tegami Naomi

ni o ga

kaku. kaku. kaku.

A sentence element is more likely to occupy the sentence-initial position when it is topicalized.

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(4-5) tegami (4-6) tegami

o o

Naomi Ken

ga ni

Ken Naomi

ni ga

kaku. kaku.

Comparable word-order variations are possible in causative sentences. Therefore, learners of Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) have to observe at least the following three principles for properly processing these types of constructions: 1. Semantic functions are not directly mapped onto word orders. 2. Semantic roles (e.g., agent, patient) of noun phrases are assigned by the case-marking particles that follow them. 3. The semantic roles assigned by case markers depend on the verb form (voice). As was initially stated, a listener/reader has to pay attention to different parts of a sentence in order to properly carry out this strategy. The strategy is more complex and diffused than the simple case-marker-referenced strategy adapted by Sasakis (1994b) JFL learners. In a complexity of formfunction mapping relation like this, JFL learners' adaptation of optimal processing strategies may be delayed. Cue Validity Model and Strategy Change What does the optimization of processing stretegies entail? McDonald's (1989) cue validity model claims that development of comprehension capability essentially is the adjustment process of sensitivity to types of cue called (cue strengths). Approximation of nativelike cue strengths allows for proper processing of linguistic input and thus provides significant momentum for language acquisition. In McDonald's formulation, a change of the cue strength occurs when learners realize that their sentence interpretations are incorrect. In that event, the strength of the cues that suggest a correct interpretation will increase. If the interpretation is correct, no change in cue strengths will take place. Accordingly McDonald (1987) reported that native Dutch speakers with a longer history of studying English were more dependent on native-Englishlike word-order-referenced strategies. Sasaki's (1994b) analysis of JFL learners revealed a similar correlation between proficiency and case-marker dependency. Heilenman and McDonald (1993) applied this cue validity model to offer an interesting pedagogical proposal: L2 learners should be exposed to noncanonical sentences, to facilitate their cue strength optimization. Nonconflict (canonical) sentences alone will not bring them very close to the nativelike cue strengths.

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In the following study, the pedagogical feasibility of this proposal was assessed by simulating it within a computer-controlled learning environment: Participants interpreted a series of noncanonical as well as canonical sentences, followed by feedback to their responses. According to the cue validity model, learners should make increasingly fewer interpretation errors in the course of the feedback learning. In other words, the present study assessed feedback's short-term effect on the subsequent sentence interpretation strategy. This was a rare attempt to incorporate an explicit training component in a competition experiment: So far, developmental comparisons under the competition model framework have been almost exclusively cross-sectional between speakers with different proficiency levels and/or calendar ages, rather than longitudinal and/or interventional (c.f. McDonald & MacWhinney, 1991). Research Questions 1. Do JFL learners count on word order or case marker cues more frequently in interpreting causative sentences? 2. Do JFL learners count on word order or case marker cues more frequently in interpreting active sentences, when those sentences are mixed with causative sentences? 3. Does error feedback lead learners to employ strategies which yield grammatically correct responses? In addition to these three research questions regarding JFL learners, native Japanese speakers' overall superiority over learners was anticipated. Namely: 4. Will native speakers respond more accurately within a shorter time period than JFL learners in all types of sentences?

METHOD Participants Participants in the study comprised two groups: The Native Japanese speaker group was made up of six graduate and undergraduate Japanese students (Jl through J6) of a large state university in New England of the U.S. They were teaching assistants or voluntary tutors of the institution's Japanese program. The English-speaking JFL learner group consisted of nine

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American students (El through E9) attending a fourth-semester intermediate-level5 Japanese course at the same institution, which course the present researcher was in charge of. Participation of the subjects was voluntary. Timing and Location The study was conducted in the spring of 1994. Learners participated in the study a few weeks after they learned the causative construction in class. The experiment was conducted individually in the present researcher's office. Instructional Backgrounds The learners had been exposed to approximately 280 hours of formal instruction of Japanese over four semesters before the experiment, or were considered to possess equally high language proficiency. The third- and fourth-semester Japanese courses were influenced by the proficiency-oriented approach (Omaggio-Hadley, 1993) with abundant oral/aural as well as reading activities. These two particular courses at the institution were meticulously crafted and intricately coordinated. Whereas their sequence of introducing grammatical structures and vocabulary items followed Nagara (1990) to maintain continuity from lower-level courses, classroom activities and assignments in these two courses centered around the two instructors' original course packages (Sasaki, 1994a; Taira, 1994), to better meet the institution's needs and students' future goals. No noncanonical causative sentences were presented to students throughout the course. Use of noncanonical active sentences, if any, was infrequent in class. Procedure Apparatus The experiment programmed with Cedrus Corporation's SuperLabe was run on a Macintosh LC Hie . The participants' choice responses and response time latency of 1-ms accuracy were automatically recorded.
5

In the present article, learners' proficiency levels are defined as follows: elementary = less than 150 hours' formal instruction, or comparable fluency; intermediate = between 150 and 300 hours' formal instruction, or comparable fluency; advanced = more than 300 hours' formal instruction, or comparable fluency. According to these criteria, the intermediate group in Sasaki (1994b) is termed as advanced in the present article.

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Sessions The study consisted of four sessions (pretest; feedback I; feedback II; posttest), which in total took about 25 min. After the experiment, the researcher interviewed each participant to solicit introspective protocol. In addition, five practice sentences were presented before the pretest. The sequence of the study was as follows: Instruction practice (5 sentences) pretest (24 sentences) > instruction > feedback I (24 sentences) feedback II (24 sentences) instruction posttest (24 sentences) > retrospection. Feedback I and II were consecutively run without an intermission. Instructions to the Participants Instructions in English were visually presented on the computer monitor, and participants read them at their own pace by pressing the space bar to renew the screen. They had a chance to ask the experimenter questions before pretest, feedback I, and posttest each started. Stimulus Sentences In each session, participants listened to a series of 24 digitized Japanese sentences recorded in a male voice. Each sentence consisted of two animate nouns followed by a case-marking particle (ga or ni), an inanimate noun followed by a direct object marker (o), and the sentence-final verb. Lexical items are listed in Appendix A. Each phrase (noun + case marker; verb) was separately recorded and subsequently assembled to make a sentence, to avoid potential phonological biases. The 24 sentences comprised the six sentences of the four types shown in Table I. All sentences were morphosyntactically well formed and semantically interpretable, although they did not depict very likely events. Here are some examples:
Table I. Types of Stimulus Sentences
Voice Case-marker order Canonical Noncanonical Active A-ga A-ni I-o Vactive A-ni A-ga I-o Vactive Causative A-ga A-ni I-o Vcausative A-ni A-ga I-o Vcausative

A: animate noun; I: inanimate noun; V: verb; ga: Japanese subject marker; ni: Japanese indirectobject marker; o: Japanese direct-object marker.

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(6) Gorira ga raion ni tegami o kaku. (A gorilla writes a letter to a lion.) (7) Inu ni pengin ga denwa o saseru. (A penguin makes a dog give a call.) (See Appendix B for the complete sentence list.) The same set of 24 sentences was reused in the subsequent three sessions (feedback I; feedback II; posttest). In total, each participant listened to 96 (= 24 X 4) sentences, in addition to the five practice items. Task. Following each sentence, a set of pictures of the six animals and birds was presented on the monitor (see Fig. 3) Learners were requested to report who they thought was the doer6 (i.e., the agent of the lexical verb, namely, the one who conducted the action of writing or phoning) in each sentence by pressing the corresponding key among the 10 numeric keys on the keyboard. For example, if a learner who considered lion as the doer was subsequently presented the screen image of Fig. 3, then s/he should press
6

The term doer was used to refer to the subject of the lexical verb throughout the classes preceding the experiment. Also, it was ascertained in the retrospection session after the experiment that the participants had interpreted the instruction as such.

Fig. 3. Visual stimuli. Dog, gorilla, lion, panda, pelican, and penguin from the lower left each corresponded to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 among the 10 numeric keys grouped on the right-hand end of the keyboard. (Positions of these animals and birds were constantly shifted between sentences.)

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Key 3, which was in the corresponding lower right position on the keyboard. If s/he considered panda (upper left position in Fig. 3) as the doer, then s/he should press Key 4. The positions of the animals/birds were constantly changed between sentences. There was no specific time limit, although learners were encouraged to respond as promptly as possible. After responding to each sentence, a learner pressed the space bar to solicit the next sentence. In the second (feedback I) and third (feedback II) sessions, a feedback message was presented after each response: When the learner provided a correct answer, a message Thats right! was presented on the screen accompanied by a sound effect. When the response was incorrect, a message Thats wrong! appeared together with a different sound effect. After one of these feedback messages, the same set of pictures was displayed again, and a circle appeared on the correct choice. In the initial (pretest) and last (posttest) sessions, no feedback was provided. Analyses The results were analyzed in terms of two measures: namely: 1. Response time latency. Both correct and incorrect responses were taken into account when analyzing the latency data.7 The latency data was converted into its natural logarithm before statistically analyses. 2. Choice response. The choice data were analyzed in the following three terms: (1) case marker (ga vs. ni) marking the chosen noun, (2) the sentential position of the chosen noun (first vs. second), and (3) correctness of the choice (correct vs. incorrect). The five practice sentences were not included in the statistical analyses. Unless otherwise stated, choice data were excluded from frequency counts when the pressed key did not correspond to one of the two animals/birds in the stimulus sentence. Such errors are likely to have stemmed from lexical, phonological, sensory, and/or motor factors, which were beyond the scope of the present study. A 2 X 2 X 2 X 4 analysis of variance (ANOVA) was run, with the two L1 groups (native Japanese vs. native English learners of JFL) as a between-subject independent variables, two voices (active vs. causative), two case marker orders (. . .ga.. .ni vs. . . .ni. . .ga) and four sessions (pretest, feedback I, feedback II, posttest) as within-subject independent variables, and the correctness of the response as the dependent variable. There were
7

Subsequent statistical analyses of latency data would have been impossible if incorrect responses were excluded, since some participants never gave correct responses in some cells.

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six replications in each cell. The correctness of each response was coded as follows: When the key corresponding to the correct agent animal/bird was pressed, it was coded as +1. When the other animal/bird in the sentence was chosen, it was coded as 1. Responses which did not fall into one of these were coded as zero.8 Another comparable 2 x 2 x 2 x 4 ANOVA was run with the response-time latency as the dependent variable.

RESULTS ANOVA of Response Accuracy Participants mostly chose their answers from one of the two animals/birds presented in each stimulus word string: A third animal/bird was chosen less than 4% of the time (85 instances out of the total 2,160 trials.) Session [F(l, 13) = 9.00, p < .001] had a significant effect: Participants' performance generally improved along the time course throughout the experiment (Figs. 2 and 3). Case-marker order also had a significant effect [F(l, 13) = 30.86, p < .00001]: The noncanonical . . .ni. . .ga sentences induced more errors than the canonical . . .ga. . .ni ones. Moreover, there was a significant interaction between case-marker order and session [F(3, 39) = 6.46, p < .05]: The accuracy rate in response to noncanonical sentences improved substantially through the feedback learning, whereas canonical sentences constantly received high accuracy rates across the four sessions (Table II). Case-marker order also produced a significant interaction with L1[F(l, 13) = 6.82, p < .05]: Native speakers' performance deteriorated in response to the noncanonical order more dramatically than learners' (Table III). There
8

This coding convention was adapted because the repeated-measures ANOVA routine of SAS cannot be executed if the data contain missing values.

Table II. Accuracy Rates (in Percentages) by Case-marker Order and Session (All Participants)
. . .ga.
Pretest Feedback I Feedback II Posttest Total

..ni

... ni ... go

Total

86.0 87.4 90.2 90.2 88.4

45.8 70.5 77.4 78.7 68.1

66.1 79.0 83.9 84.5 78.4

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was a higher interaction as well between LI, voice, and case marker [F(l, 13) = 7.64, p < .05]: Native Japanese speakers made more errors in response to noncanonical active rather than noncanonical causative sentences, whereas JFL learners made fewer errors in regard to active sentences across the board. One of the Japanese speakers (J3) reflected that, in the middle of a feedback session after repeatedly receiving negative feedback, she had become unsure what a doer meant, whereas her initial understanding was consistent with the intent of the study. To confirm that the native speakers' particular difficulty in processing noncanonical active sentences was in effect before feedback was presented, participants' error frequencies in the pretest session were separately counted. Table IV clearly shows the same tendency in this particular session. On the other hand, voice was not a significant effect [F(1, 13) = 2.08, n.s.]. Neither did its interaction with L1 reach the significant level [F(l, 13) = 0.788, n.s.]. ANOVA of Response-Time Latency Case-marker order proved to be a significant effect [F(l, 13) = 19.23, p < .001]: The noncanonical . . .ni. . .ga sentences (2.81 s) generally took longer than the canonical . . .ga. . .ni sentences (2.44 s) to respond to.
Table III. Accuracy Rates (in Percentages) by Voice, Case-Marker Order and Ll
. . . ga
ni ni . . . ga

Case-marker order JFL learners Native Japanese speakers Total

Active 87.9 97.2 91.8

Causative Subtotal 83.2 87.9 85.1 85.5 92.6 88.5

Active Causative 77.7 56.7 69.1 68.8 64.4 67.0

Subtotal Total 73.4 60.5 68.1 79.5 76.8 78.4

L1 = first-language; JFL learners = learners of Japanese as a foreign language.

Table IV. Accuracy Rates (in Percentages) by Voice, Case-Marker Order and LI in the
Pretest3
. . . ga . . . ni

. . . ni . . . ga

Case-marker order JFL learners Native Japanese speakers Total

Active
84.9 100.0 91.0

Causative
68.8 97.1 80.7

Subtotal
77.2 98.6 86.0

Active
52.0 36.4 45.8

Causative
46.9 42.9 45.2

Subtotal
49.5 39.7 45.5

Total
63.5 69.8 66.1

L1 = first-language; JFL learners = learners of Japanese as a foreign language.

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Voice X Session X LI was also significant [F(3, 39) = 5.69, p < .005]. Whereas English speakers' latency generally shortened throughout the feedback training, and the tendency was particularly apparent in response to causative sentences, Japanese speakers did not indicate a similar decrease pattern. In fact, their latency to causative sentences increased over time (Table V). Response-Time Latency X Choice Accuracy Tables VI and VIII each represent the pattern of latency when the choices were correct/incorrect (choosing a third animal/bird, namely, one which was not stated in the stimulus word string, was excluded from the analyses). Table VI (correct choice) generally follows the overall pattern as stated above. Namely, English speakers' latency generally shortened throughout the feedback training, whereas Japanese speakers' latency to causative sentences increased over time.

Table V.

Overall Response-Time Latencies (in Milliseconds) by L1 and Voice: Unweiehed Geometric Means JFL learners Active Causative 3,562 2,556 2,610 2,722 2,836 Subtotal Native Japanese speakers Active Causative Subtotal Total 2,763 2,448 2,551 2,728 2,619

Pretest Feedback I Feedback II Posttest Total

3,041 2,901 2,798 3,078 2,952

3,291 2,723 2,703 2,895 2,894

2,134 1,905 2,128 2,115 2,068

2,116 2,286 2,570 2,948 2,460

2,125 2,087 2,338 2,497 2,256

LI = first language; JFL learners = learners of Japanese as a foreign language.

Table VI.

Response-Time Latencies (in Milliseconds) by LI and Voice: Correct Answers: Unweighed Geometric Means JFL learners Active Causative 2,948 2,510 2,246 2,471 2,500 Subtotal 2,966 2,493 2,470 2,420 2,554 Native Japanese speakers Active Causative Subtotal Total

Pretest Feedback I Feedback II Posttest Total

2,981 2,477 2,676 2,371 2,603

2,013 1,786 2,002 2,002 1,949

1,918 2,032 2,396 2,664 2,244

1,964 1,904 2,181 2,298 2,088

2,481 2,234 2,352 2,371 2,354

L1 = first language; JFL learners = learners of Japanese as a foreign language.

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On the other hand, Table VII (incorrect choices) reveals latency's general increase toward the end of the experiment. On average, incorrect choices (3,388 ms) took longer than correct answers (2,354 ms) to be made. No further inferential statistics (e.g., ANOVA) were applied to the response latency data tabulated by choice (in)accuracy, because the skewed distribution of accurate and inaccurate choices across cells (see Appendix D) resulted in a shortage of the degree of freedom. Responses of JFL Learners in the Pretest Session None of the nine English speakers presented an error-free performance in the pretest session: All of them made four or more errors in the 24 trials. Moreover, eight of them made at least one error in response to active sentences; only one (E9) provided an error-free performance to active sentences. Overall, a strong word order bias was generally evident in the English speakers responses: When their responses to canonical and noncanonical active sentences in the pretest were consolidated, they chose the first noun 67% of the time. They chose the second noun 61.6% of the time in response to causative sentences. Moreover, in response to active ni-ga sentences, they incorrectly chose the first ni noun 48% of the time. Namely, the word-order effect [SO(O)V schema] stood on a par with the case-marker effect (see Table VIII for results from conflict sentences9). Responses of Native Japanese Speakers in the Pretest Session Surprisingly numerous errors were committed by the native Japanese speakers (Table IV). In total, they made errors more than 30% of the time.
9

Note that collective tabulation can obscure certain individuals' response patterns. For example, one JFL learner (E3) chose the first noun with ni in active sentences because of the case marker ni. Such idiosyncrasies are masked in Table VIII.

Table VII. Response-Time Latencies (in Milliseconds) by L1 and Voice: Incorrect Answers: Unweighed Geometric Means (Third- Animal Choices Are Excluded) JFL learners Active Pretest Feedback I Feedback II Posttest Total 2,775 4,165 4,879 8,121 3,956 Causative 4,287 2,728 4,307 5,254 3,998 Subtotal 3,543 3,276 4,490 6,424 3,980 Native Japanese speakers Active 2,255 2,315 2,803 2,712 2,464 Causative 2,450 3,062 3,301 4,273 2,603 Subtotal 3,250 2,629 3,060 3,433 3,114 Total 3,050 2,953 3,693 4,668 3,388

LI = first language; JFL learners = learners of Japanese as a foreign language.

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Table VIII. Agent Choice by Cues in Noncanonical Sentences (Values in Percentages) (Word-Order vs. Case-Marker Conflict Sentences, While Other Cues Were Neutralized) Choices consistent with word order cue (wrong) 1st accusative noun* Bgn. learners Adv. learners Native Japanese This study Double-object active [pretest] (N-ni N-ga N-o Vactive) Intmd. learners Native Japanese Transitive causative (N-ni N-ga N-o Vcausative) Intmd. learners Native Japanese Choices consistent with case marker cue (correct) 2nd nominative noun

Study Sasaki (1994b)

Sentence type Simple transitive active (N-o/0 N-0/ga V)

Subjects

43.6 37.5 10.3

1st noun with ni

56.4 62.5 89.7

2nd noun with ga

48.0 63.6
2nd noun with ga

52.0 36.4
1st noun with ni

53.1 57.1

46.9 42.9

Bgn. = beginning; Adv. = advanced; Int md. = intermediate. * In half of the cases, the first noun was explicity marked for accusative by o. In other cases, the first noun was unmarked, and instead, the second noun was marked for nominative by ga. c In half of the cases, the second noun was explicitly marked for nominative by ga. In other cases, the second noun was unmarked, and instead, the first noun was marked for accusative by o.

Most of those errors took place in response to noncanonical . . . n i . . .ga sentences, where they chose the first noun in active and the second noun in causative sentences each. When the six native Japanese speakers' responses to canonical and noncanonical active sentences in the pretest were consolidated, they chose the first noun 82.6% of the time; they chose the second noun 77.1% of the time in response to causative sentences. In response to noncanonical active sentences, they (erroneously) chose the first noun 63.6% of the time, which is far beyond 48% by JFL learners. The comparable firstnoun choice ratio in noncanonical sentences by Sasakis (1994b) native Japanese participants was 10.3% (Table VIII). Effects of Feedback on Performance Change Figure 4 shows the longitudinal change of accuracy rates of the JFL learner group in the four stages of the experiment (i.e., pretest, feedback I,

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Fig. 4. Changes of accuracy rate by sentence type for learners of Japanese as a foreign language.

feedback II, and posttest). The accuracy rates improved over time in response to all four sentence types. Overall, the effect of error feedback on strategy change was confirmed. The effects of error feedback on Japanese speakers' strategy change appeared less impressive (Fig. 5), though this group difference (Group X Session) did not reach a statistically significant level [F(3, 39) = 1.03, n.s.]. All six native Japanese speakers made at least one error in the posttest session, whereas three learners (E4, E5, and E9) presented an error-free performance there.

DISCUSSION Unexpectedly, in the pretest there was only one JFL learner (E9) who provided an error-free performance in interpreting active sentences, despite the fact that the learners should have been familiar with subject marker-ga for the preceding three and a half semesters. Their substantial reliance on word order provided a sharp contrast with the performance of beginning and

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Fig. 5. Native Japanese speakers' Changes of accuracy rate by sentence type.

intermediate learners in Sasaki's (1994b) study in response to simple active Japanese sentences (noun-noun-verb, or NNV). A retabulation of his original data (Sasaki, 1992, 1994b) revealed that native English-speaking beginning and intermediate learners each chose the first noun 58.6% and 63.6% of the time, respectively, in response to casebiased animacy-neutral active sentences. These figures were markedly or marginally lower than 67%, the first-noun choice ratio of English speakers in response to comparable active sentences in the pretest of the present study. Moreover, the first-noun choice ratio of 48% in response to noncanonical active sentences (N-ni N-ga N-o V) in the present study's pretest exceeded the counterpart figures of 43.6% (beginning learners) and 37.5% (advanced learners) in Sasaki (1992). Though inferential statistics are not applicable to test the significance of the difference between these two studies since each used a different set of linguistic materials, the perceived pattern revealed a stronger word order effect in the present study, as Fig. 6 scehmatically illustrates the data in Table VIII. This word-order bias was even more prominent in native speakers' performance: As opposed to the initial anticipation, they made staggeringly

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Fig. 6. A schematic illustration of word order versus case-marker biases in Japanese conflict sentences.

numerous errors due to positional biases. Indeed, the native speaker group was outperformed by the English-speaking JFL learner group in terms of their accuracy in interpreting noncanonical sentences (Tables III and IV). In total, they chose the first noun of active sentences in the pretest 82.6% of the time, which was substantially higher than the 55.2% calculated from the data by Sasaki's (1994b) native Japanese-speaking subjects, in response to counterpart, case-biased animacy-neutral active sentences. His native Japanese speakers were subject to a dominance of case-marking cues over word-order cues when interpreting Japanese simple transitive sentences in the active voice. This is a striking phenomenon, if the Japanese participants of the present study (U.S. residents) are representative of the native Japanese-speaking population. Indeed the results from the present study provide a virtual mirror image to those of Sasaki (1994b). They also stands in contrast to preceding studies which reported a positive correlation between L2 proficiency and sensitivity to grammatical cues which are valid in the target language (Kilborn, 1987; McDonald, 1987). In the face of this new finding, Sasaki's (1994b) results have to be reinterpreted within a broader context. One of the native Japanese speakers in the present study who received many error correction messages (Jl) spontaneously started repeating the sentences to herself, before she chose the doer noun of each sentence. The present researcher sitting behind her observed that in those repetitions she

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systematically inverted the case marker orders of noncanonical sentences to make them into canonical ones (e.g., she heard Panda NI raion GA denwa o suru and reconstructed Panda GA raion NI denwa o suru) while an inversion in the opposite direction (from canonical to noncanonical) was not observed. Misrecollections of noun orders and verb voices were not observed, either. The present researcher had similar experiences of incorrectly recalling case marker sequences when he ran the experiment with himself, despite the fact that those case markers were clearly audible. Essentially, many of the errors made by the native Japanese speakers seemed due to their imposing the canonical . . .ga. . .ni schema as the template when trying to retain/recall . . .ni. . .ga sentences: They responded to erroneously recollected case-marker sequences, thus yielding the positional bias. When they chose the doer noun, the original case-marker sequence was often inaccessible to them. Are Sentences Processed Differently in Different Contexts? Sasaki (1992, 1994b) and the present study provide marked differences in terms of comparable participants word-order dependency in active sentences. This suggests that exposures to causative sentences affected the learners' interpretation of subsequent active sentences. This hypothesis could be more rigorously tested by having learners process the same set of sentences under two different conditions (one voice at a time vs. active-andcausative mixture). This possible environment dependency of sentence processing strategy coincides with a common experience by language learners: Less proficient learners often find it difficult to smoothly access a pertinent morphosyntactic schema to interpret a linguistic structure embedded in a text/speech, which form they are supposed to be familiar with through a grammar class. Miyake (personal communication, 1992; 1994 Miyake & Friedman (in press) presented an interesting perspective concerning this phenomenon: He explained the dominance of noun animacy over word-order cues reported by Sasaki (1991), by hypothesizing that local-cue-referenced strategies are easier to adapt because of their resource-thrifty nature: A local-cue-referenced strategy (e.g., noun animacy, case marking) does not occupy as much working memory capacity as a diffused one (e.g., word order, noun-verb agreement), once identifying the subject noun is the sole task. This hypothesis effectively explains the significant role of case markers in Sasaki (1994b) as well. The case-marker-cues were not as influential in the present study, presumably because they did not serve as local strategies in the given condition:

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In order to reach a correct sentence interpretation, case cues must be retained in memory until the sentence-final verb is presented. Thus the relative advantage of the case-marker cues over word-order cues in terms of memory efficiency diminished. Granting that the case-marker-referenced strategies in the present study's design were not as memory-efficient as in Sasaki's (1994b), there still remains a question why the word-order cues so overwhelmingly dominated case marker cues in many participants' minds, among them those of the native Japanese speakers. This issue will be discussed in the following section. Is Word Order a Prepotent Cue? Obviously, the strong word-order bias native Japanese speakers revealed must have developed through their massive exposure to the Japanese language speech over their lifetimes, which corpus contains numerous canonical S-ga O-ni O-o V sentences.10 However, the linguistic input (amount of exposure) alone, at best, provides no more than a partial explanation for their heavy reliance on word order over case markers, because the ubiquitous Japanese case markers have an even higher cue validity than word order. Therefore, it would be prudent to suspect that word order's dominance is partly grounded in the human cognitive system. This proposal might sound counterintuitive to some readers, who are aware that the rigid word-order-based system typical of English is typologically exceptional (MacWhinney & Bates, 1981). Sasaki's (1994b) results also suggest that case markers rather than word order is an easier cue to learn to employ.

Cue Assignability and Vulnerabilities of Strategies At the ,same time, it is well known that Creole languages are highly dependent on word orders in assigning thematic roles, in the absence of rich case-marking devices. As was hinted in the above-cited retrospection by
10

As a matter of fact, it is possible that JFL learners' relative sensitivity to case-marker dislocations over that of native Japanese speakers was due to their lack of past exposure to noncanonical sentences: Encounters with . . . ni . . . ga sequences during the experiment might have provided violations of the familiar Japanese sentence schema which were memorable novel episodes to them, as memory research suggests. The noncanonical sequence was not nearly as irregular to the mind of native speakers (though it is unusual), and thus easily slipped their mind during the challenging processing task.

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some learners, one-syllable case-marking particles are difficult to retain in the course of a demanding on-line speech processing task, unless their semantic functions are immediately determinable; content word-order information is more salient and easier to retain. In terms of cue assignability, or memory load, namely, the amount of material that must be held in memory before a meaning assignment can be made (Bates & MacWhinney, 1989, p. 58), morphological and casemarking cues under some circumstances can be more costly than word-order cues. Indeed, this notion of processing resource constraint plays an increasingly important role in the recent competition model literature. The following characterization of morphological cues by Bates and Wulfeck (1989) applies to Japanese case-marker cues as well:
...the assignability dimension should have its biggest impact on closed-class morphology....And given the referential/predicative functions played by content words, most of the communicative work an item must carry out can be completed quickly as soon as the word is identified. By contrast, most closed-class morphemes must be bound to a governing word or phrase....This means that closed-class morphemes make heavier demand of short-term memory resourceswhich is problematic, given the fact that these items are low in imagery and other factors that make an item easy to keep in mind. (p. 366)

The robustness of content word-order information under suboptimal situations is evidenced by neurolinguistic studies as well: Bates, Friederici, and Wulfeck (1987) reported that brain damage impairs patients' sensitivity to morphological cues more strongly than their sensitivity to word-order cues. Also, MacWhinney, Osman-Sagi, and Slobin (1991) reported Turkish aphasic subjects reduced sensitivity to case-marking cues, as opposed to the resilience of word-order cues by English-speaking patients. Effects of Feedback on Processing Strategy Change The significant effect of Session on JFL learners accuracy rates suggests that error feedback provides a positive effect on performance: In a future study, it would be desirable to use a control group which receives no error feedback throughout the experiment, to tease apart the effects of replication versus feedback. On the other hand, the native Japanese speakers appeared as relatively slow in their decrease of error rates throughout the error feedback learning. Figure 5, in contrast to Fig. 4, reveals that the strategy shifts of native Japanese speakers were not as sweeping as those of native English speakers. This can be explained in terms of their higher level of absolute cue strength values. According to the cue validity model, the change of the cue strengths

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is always incremental: Weakening of a certain cues effect is explained in terms of the increase of competing cues' strengths. After their life-time exposure to the language, the native Japanese speakers' cue strengths had reached a very high level. The 48 feedback messages throughout this experiment would have made no more than a tiny bump on that monolith. The absolute values of JFL learners cue strengths were much lower, and thus the short session was able to change their performance considerably. In this regard, those numerous native speaker errors may not be as surprising as they would seem: It is well known that native speakers are often poor proofreaders of typographical errors. Their top-down processing is so efficient and influential that they tend to see a text as it should read, rather than as it does read (in terms of pragmatics, grammar, orthography, etc.). Top-down processing can be even more influential when the text is presented orally, which does not allow for backtracking. The heavier processing load imposed in the present study would also have contributed to the greater role of an automatized routine. Presumably this is why native Japanese speakers showed poorer performance in response to noncanonical active rather than causative sentences (Table III): The instantiation of the active sentence -ga -ni schema was particularly highly automatized because of the native speakers' numerous encounters with them, to the extent that the fragile memory traces of casemarker positions were easily pushed away. Their generally faster responses to active rather than causative sentences (Appendix D) are also consistent with the hypothesis that the active sentence schema is stronger.11 Indeed the responses to noncanonical causative sentences were slowed down after the numerous error messages, whereas responses to noncanonical actives remained speedy: Native speakers continued to make position-biased errors swiftly, which typifies an automatic behavior. It would be reasonable to hypothesize that a word-order-referenced rather than a case-marker-referenced strategy can be more thoroughly automatized, because the former is basically a sequential process (e.g., The first noun is . ..; the second noun is . . .) which involves only minimal conditional branching. On the other hand, the latter strategy requires incessant detection of particular features of incoming speech segments, followed by each accordingly different processing routines (e.g., If a noun is followed by ga, then . . .; if it is followed by o, then . . . ) . If this automatization is a valid account for the native Japanese speakers' numerous interpretation errors, those errors would paradoxically reflect their native-level proficiency, which is characteristic of an optimal allocation
11

Native Japanese speakers' longer latencies to canonical active (1,909 ms) than to causative (1,785 ms) in the pretest provided an exception, which is difficult to interpret.

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of mental resources. It delivers efficient speech comprehension under normal conditions. Under the unusual condition of the current study (i.e., an unusually high ratio of noncanonical sentences without extragrammatical clues), however, it induced many errors. Why Can Native Japanese Speakers Perform Well in Real Life? It should be explained here that Japanese noncanonical sentences do not always present as much comprehension difficulty in real-life communication: It has not been reported that native Japanese speakers often misinterpret such sentences presented in normal conversation. One possible explanation would involve the form-function mapping schema: In a normal corpus, the majority of sentences are active, and only occasionally are other voices used. Therefore, listeners may initially assume all sentences to be active: In most cases, it is safe to assign an agent/experiencer role to a ga noun. This assumption of a one-to-one form-function-mapping relation reduces the processing load, making it easier for listeners to retain case-marker positions. Only when they later realize that the sentence has a nonactive voice, may they invoke an off-line strategy to reassign semantic roles. This hypothesis triggers a suspicion that the unusually high ratio of causative sentences in the present study might have forced the participants to abandon the heuristics they would have otherwise employed. In that particular event, they had to delay role assignments until the very end of the sentence. Also, the poverty of extragrammatical clues in the present study might have made the task harder: In normal communication, such additional information is typically available. Presumably native speakers take advantage of some additional clues which are readily available in real-life speech to accomplish their seemingly flawless performance. It is likely that such clues involve meaning information (pragmatics and/or semantics), and possibly phonology (intonation, stress, pause) as well. To test this, the current research paradigm should be extended to a discourse level, where such pragmatic/semantic clues are readily available. Pedagogical Applications and Implications The present study has provided mixed results regarding one of its original aims of exploring the pedagogical application of the competition experiment paradigm: On the one hand, many learners correctly interpreted virtually all sentences toward the end of the experiment, which took less than 30 min. The obvious effect of feedback learning on strategy change encourages us to envision an implementation of the present study's paradigm in foreign language courseware, perhaps in the natural context of a com-

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municative reading/listening activity: namely, presenting a mixture of canonical and noncanonical sentences to learners, followed by feedback to their interpretations. This can be efficiently carried out within a computercontrolled learning environment, as was prototyped in the present study. On the other hand, however, native Japanese speakers' surprisingly poor performance casts serious doubt upon the validity of this particular competition experiment design as a measurement tool of Japanese language proficiency. Before an all-out instructional application of the current research paradigm is attempted, therefore, it is essential to elucidate what underlies native speakers' seemingly flawless performance in the real-life communication. That insight will help reconstruct an authentic speech situation within a classroom/laboratory, so that the ecological validity of a psycholinguistic experiment as a simulation of human communication is enhanced. It is likely that pragmatic/semantic clues play a crucial role in people's minds, which the current study did not systematically manipulate. CONCLUDING REMARKS The present study provides several insights into the nature of human speech processing: The major findings are as follows: 1. There were considerable word order biases in JFL learners responses to active and causative sentences. 2. Native Japanese speakers were subject to even stronger word-order biases, to the extent that case-marking cues were overwhelmed. 3. JFL learners made fewer errors after the error feedback learning. 4. Native speakers' decrements of errors throughout the feedback training were less impressive. On the other hand, the generalization of these findings is still limited because of some remaining questions, including the external validity of results, the possible significant effects of discoursal pragmatic and/or semantic cues, listeners' psychological set on comprehension strategies, and the longterm effects of error feedback learning. A replication study with a larger number of subjects including a control group will be necessary to test the replicability of the tentative conclusions presented above.

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APPENDIX A
Lexical Items in the Strings Animate nouns gorira (gorilla) raion (lion) perikcm (pelican) ga (subject marker) ni (indirect object marker) denwa o suru/saseru (to give/make give a phone call) tegami o kaku/kakuseru (to write/makewrite a letter) inu (dog) panda (panda) pengin (penguin)

Case markers Object + verb

APPENDIX B
Stimulus sentences. (The following set of sentences was used in the four sessions once each, in the order of blocks. Within each block, presentation order was randomized.) These sentences are all grammatical (i.e., morphosytactically well formed) and semantically interpretable. Block 1 perikan-ga raion-ga inu-ni gorira-ni perikan-ga raion-ga inu-ni gorira-ni imt-ga raion-ga perikan-ni penguin-ni inu-ga raion-ga perikan-ni penguin-ni penguin-ga raion-ga perikan-ni gorira-ni penguin-ga raion-ga perikan-ni gorira-ni inu-ni panda-ni penguin-ga raion-ga inu-ni panda-ni penguin-ga raion-ga Block 2 gorira-ni panda-ni inu-ga raion-ga gorira-ni panda-ni inu-ga raion-ga Block 3 gorira-ni panda-ni inu-ga raion-ga gorira-ni panda-ni inu-ga raion-ga denwa-o tegami-o denwa-o tegami-o denwa-o tegami-o denwa-o tegami-o suru kaku suru kaku saseru kakaseru saseru kakaseru denwa-o tegami-o denwa-o tegami-o denwa-o tegami-o denwa-o tegami-o suru kaku denwa-o tegami-o denwa-o tegami-o denwa-o tegami-o denwa-o tegami-o

sum
kaku

sum
kaku sasem kakaseru sasem kakaseru

sum
kaku saseru kakaseru saseru kakaseru

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APPENDIX C
Summary of Choice Results by Voice, Case-Marker order, Session, and L1 (Accuracy Rate), all in Percentages Voice
Active Case-marker order English Pretest speakers Feedback (n = 9) Feedback Posttest Subtotal Japanese Pretest Feedback Feedback Posttest Subtotal Total I II Causative

.. ga . . . ni . . . ni . . . ga Subtotal . . . ga . . . ni . . . m . . . ga Subtotal Total

I II

84.9% 87.0% 90.0% 89.8% 87.9% 100.0% 94.4% 97.2% 97.2% 97.2% 91.8%

52.0% 79.2% 92.5% 86.3% 77.7% 36.4% 55.6% 66.7% 66.7% 56.7% 69.1%

68.7% 83.0% 91.3% 88.0% 85.5% 69.6% 75.0% 81.9% 81.9% 77.2% 80.4%

68.8% 88.0% 86.5% 88.5% 83.0% 97.1% 80.0% 88.6% 86.1% 88.0% 69.1%

46.9% 69.4% 75.6% 83.7% 68.8% 42.9% 75.8% 67.6% 72.7% 64.4% 67.0%

57.7% 78.8% 81.4% 95.6% 76.1% 70.0% 77.9% 78.3% 79.7% 76.4% 76.3%

63.5% 68.1% 68.1% 87.1% 79.5% 69.8% 76.4% 80.1% 80.9% 76.8% 78.4%

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McDonald, J. L. (1987). Sentence interpretation in bilingual speakers of English and Dutch. Applied Psycholinguistics, 8, 379-413. McDonald, J. L. (1989). The acquisition of cue-category mappings. In B. MacWhinney & E. Bates (Eds.), The crosslinguistic study of sentence processing, (pp. 375-396) New York: Cambridge University Press. McDonald, J. L. & MacWhinney, B.. (1991). Levels of learning: A comparison of concept formation and language acquisition. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 407-430. Miyake A. (1994). Toward a unified theory of capacity constraints: The role of working memory in complex cognition. Cognitive Studies: Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society, 1, 43-62. Miyake, A. & Friedman, N. (in press). Individual differences in second language proficiency: Working memory as Language aptitude. In, Healey, A. & Bourne, L. (Eds.), Foreign language learning: Psycholinguistic studies on training and retention. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Nagara, S. (Ed.). (1990). Japanese for everyone. Tokyo, Japan: Gakken. Omaggio-Hadley, A. (1993). Teaching language in context (2nd ed.). Boston, MA: Heinle & Heinle. Sasaki, Y. (1991). English and Japanese interlanguage comprehension strategies. Applied Psycholinguistics, 12, 4773. Sasaki, Y. (1992). Paths of processing strategy transfers in learning Japanese, and English as foreign languages: A competition model approach. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Sasaki, Y. (1994a). A study guide and exercise book for Japanese for everyone (Lesson 14~26). Unpublished course packet, University of Massachusetts. Sasaki, Y. (1994b). Paths of processing strategy transfers in learning Japanese and English as foreign languages: A competition model approach. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 16, 329350. Slobin, D. I. (1979). Psycholinguistics (2nd ed.). London, England: Scott, Foresman. Taira, N. (1994). Intermediate Japanese role-play kits. Unpublished course packet, University of Massachusetts.