Incremental pre-head attachment in Japanese parsing

The present study addresses the question of whether structural analyses of verb-arguments are postponed up until the head verb has been processed (hea d-driven parsing accounts) or initiated prior to the appearance of the verb (pre-head attachment accounts). To explore this question in relation to a head-final language, a Japanese dative argument attachment ambiguity was ex amined in both a questionnaire study (Experiment 1) and a self-paced readin g test (Experiment 2). The data suggested that the dative argument attachme nt ambiguity is resolved in the manner predicted by pre-head attachment acc ounts. The results were incompatible with most variants of the head-driven parsing model, and were not of the form currently predicted by constraint-s atisfaction models. We end by discussing the general theoretical implicatio ns of the findings.