I'm gonna be frank: I'm a high school student who has limited experience with linguistics. I've never studied it, I've just read a textbook and a handful of seminal studies. Recently, though, I was reminded of the concept of modular vs interactive sentence processing when, in one of my classes, it became obvious that most people had misinterpreted a sentence on the lecturer's slide show. After a drawn-out class discussion where we all gradually came to this realization, I noted that the 6 native Japanese speakers in the room were the only ones to understand the sentence's correct meaning.
The incident could easily be coincidence(and may not even indicate anything valuable about sentence processing), but it does raise an interesting point: different languages could theoretically encourage different means of sentence processing. Does any peer-reviewed research exist to corroborate this idea?
