Between Reading Time and Syntactic/Semantic Categories

AbstractThis article presents a contrastive analysis between reading time and syntactic/semantic categories in Japanese. We overlaid the reading time annotation of BCCWJ-EyeTrack and a syntactic/semantic category information annotation on the ‘Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese’. Statistical analysis based on a mixed linear model showed that verbal phrases tend to have shorter reading times than adjectives, adverbial phrases, or nominal phrases. The results suggest that the preceding phrases associated with the presenting phrases promote the reading process to shorten the gazing time.