Abstract. This article presents two on‐line self‐paced reading studies and three off‐line acceptability judgment studies on the processing of backward anaphoric dependencies in Japanese in which a pronoun precedes potential antecedent noun phrases. The studies investigate the real‐time formation of coreference relations and operator‐variable binding relations to determine whether speakers of head‐final languages are able to construct grammatically accurate syntactic structures before they encounter a verb. The results of the acceptability rating studies confirm previous claims that backwards anaphoric dependencies in Japanese are more acceptable in configurations where a pronoun has been fronted via scrambling from a position where it would be c‐commanded by its antecedent. The results of the on‐line studies demonstrate that these acceptability contrasts have an immediate impact on parsing. Reading‐time results showed immediate sensitivity to the semantic congruency between an NP and a preceding pronoun in noncanonical (“scrambled”) word orders, and no immediate effect of semantic congruency otherwise. This contrast was found both for coreference relations involving the personal pronouns kare / kanojo (experiment 1) and for operator‐variable relations involving the demonstrative pronoun soko (experiment 3). These findings go beyond previous evidence for incremental parsing in head‐final languages by showing that Japanese speakers build compositional structures (such as anaphoric relations) in a grammatically constrained fashion in advance of encountering a verb in the input.
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