Focus as a contextual priming mechanism in reading

Abstract

In two experiments, we found that readers are sensitive to manipulations of syntactically marked focus and that focus is an effective message level contextual priming mechanism. Changes in focus resulted in changes in sentence context effects on subsequent target word processing. This was demonstrated in latency to name the target word (Experiment 1) and in initial looking time on the target in silent reading (Experiment 2). Experiment 2 also revealed direct effects on the focused items, as readers made fewer regressions and spent less total time on a word that was focused than when it was not focused. However, no initial processing time effects were found on the focused word.Word processing is a fundamental component of the reading process. Thus, our understanding of the reading process necessarily hinges in large part on our understanding of how words are processed in context. It has often been observed that words are processed more easily in related sentence contexts than in unrelated sentence contexts (Duffy, Henderson, & Morris, 1989;Foss, 1982;Hess, Foss, & Carroll, 1995;Morris, 1994;Simpson, Peterson, Casteel, & Burgess, 1989;Stanovich & West, 1979,1983West & Stanovich, 1982;Whitney, McKay, Kellas, & Emerson, 1985). However, explanations ofthese effects differ greatly. The purpose of the present experiments was to investigate a possible message level mechanism of sentence context effects.Lexical level explanations of sentence context effects on word processing center on the premise that contextual facilitation arises from word-to-word priming mechanisms (intralexical priming). The assumptions underlying this position are derived from modular views of the language processing system in which the lexical processor is autonomous, acting only on information contained within the lexicon. According to this account, contextual effects are the result of activation spreading from related words in a context to the target word, speeding access of the subsequent target word (e.g., Duffy et al., 1989;Fodor, 1983;Forster, 1981; Seidenberg, Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Bienkowski, 1982), in much the same way that semantic relatedness effects occur in word lists (e.g., Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1976).While context effects on word processing in reading may arise in part from intralexical priming, there is growThis research was partially supported by Undergraduate Research Training Grant SBR-9400285 from the National Science Foundation. The authors thank Jennifer Mangum for her assistance in material preparation and in collecting the Experiment I data. 1. R. Folk is now at the Department ofCognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to R. K. Morris, Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208 (e-mail: morris@garnet.cla.sc.edu).ing consensus that this processing advantage cannot be fully accounted for by lexical level explanations. For example, there is evidence of faster processing for words in related context, even in the absence ...

Linguistic focus and memory: An eye movement study

“…If anything, the results show that focus speeded up, rather than slowed down, processing in the first display, a result that is consistent with that of Morris and Folk (1998), although we observed this speedup only in the regions before our critical word, which could be explained in terms of repetition. The effect of focus on reading in the second display is consistent with the claim that focus leads to a more detailed semantic representation, since the processing system clearly reacts to the word change more strongly in focus than in nonfocus conditions.…”

“…Such a "masking" effect would thus have to have been localized on the critical word in order to explain our results. Furthermore, the idea that focus leads to more effortful encoding is not consistent with the results of Morris and Folk (1998), who found a speedup for focused phrases despite a lack of lexical repetition.…”

“…Recall that the eye movement literature is at odds with itself over the question of how focus affects eye movements, with both Birch and Rayner (1997) and Morris and Folk (1998) reporting contradictory findings in measures of later processing, and Birch and Rayner reporting initial processing effects only when an entire phrase was in focus. We hoped that the analysis of eye fixations in first displays might bring some clarity on this issue.…”

“…Previous work cited above (Birch & Rayner, 1997;Morris & Folk, 1998) yielded conflicting results on the question of whether focus speeds up or slows down reading. In this article, we have concentrated on the question of how focus affects the specificity of representation, rather than on how focus affects reading speed per se.…”

“…In fact, Morris and Folk (1998) found that total fixation times were actually shorter for focused than for nonfocused words, and they claimed instead that focused information was easier to integrate into the discourse representation than nonfocused information. Enhanced integration of focused information might lead to more detailed memory representations, which also could explain the performance benefit for focused items in Sturt et al's (2004) change detection task.…”