Differences Between Korean and Japanese Processing Overload

We report the results of a pilot questionnaire study which indicates a difference between Japanese and Korean in the processing of twice center-embedded transitive sentences. Babyonyshev and Gibson (1995) claimed that, in Japanese, these structures are significantly more difficult to parse than twice center-embedded intransitives. Our study showed that, in Korean, this difference in processing difficulty does not obtain. We suggest that the difference between Japanese and Korean processing should be attributed to short-term memory effects on repetition of case markers and to differences in the syntax of the two languages with respect to verb movement.