Comprehension of underspecified iterative meaning in Japanese

Abstract

We examine the processing of underspecified iterative meaning in sentences like “The athlete jumped for 20 minutes” in Japanese, crossing two verb types (Punctual: jump / Durative: jog) and the length of the intervals denoted by for-adverbials (Short: ten minutes / Long: a year). Additionally, we investigate the impact of individuals’ autistic tendency (AQ) during sentence comprehension. We found that the naturalness of sentences decreased as a function of meaning uncertainty. The self-paced reading experiment showed that sentences with underspecified meaning engendered longer reading times regardless of verb type, and that individuals with higher AQ scores (> low-AQ) stayed longer at the sentence-final region.