Linguistic focus and memory: An eye movement study

Abstract

We report an eyetracking study investigating the effects of linguistic focus on eye movements and memory during two readings of a text. Across two presentations of the text, a critical word either changed to a semantically related word or remained unchanged. Focus on the critical word was manipulated using context. Eye movements were monitored during reading, and there was a secondary task of detecting the word change. Results indicated that when a word changed, participants were more successful at detecting it when it was in focus. In the second display, there were more fixations and longer viewing times on a changed than on an unchanged word, but only when the critical word was in focus; eye movement data for changed and unchanged words did not differ when the word was not in focus. We suggest that linguistic focus leads to more detailed lexical semantic representations but not more effortful initial encoding of information. Memory & Cognition 2007, 35 (1), 73-86 P. Ward, peter@psy.gla.ac.uk

Effects of syntactic prominence on eye movements during reading

“…Moreover, there was no significant effect for this measure in Birch and Rayner (1997) or in Morris and Folk (1998). (This measure was not reported in the other two eyetracking studies of prominence, Scinto [1978] and Ward & Sturt [2007].) Most importantly, in spite of the unusual result for regressions out in Experiment 3B, the results for the remaining measures of reading-including measures that reflect early encoding and text integration-were the same as those in Experiments 1, 2, and 3A.…”

“…In Birch and Rayner (1997), we used focusing phrases, it-clefts and there-insertion (Experiment 1), and focus questions (Experiment 2) to place a word or phrase in focus. Morris andFolk (1998) used it-clefts, andSturt (2007) used context questions to manipulate focus. According to Wilson and Sperber's (1979) analysis, focusing devices per se indicate prominence more clearly than do differences in syntactic position such as predicate versus prenominal modifier.…”

“…Workers in the suburb hurried to restore power after the ice storm. Sturt (2007), focus was manipulated by a prior context sentence that contained an explicit (Birch & Rayner, 1997) or embedded (Ward & Sturt, 2007) question that focused a target word or phrase. For both experiments, the comparison condition was not the lack of any question, but rather an alternative question that focused a different target word or phrase.…”

“…They argued that their results indicate that focus does not affect lexical access but does facilitate text-integration processes for the prominent concepts. Ward and Sturt (2007) also measured eye movements but found no direct processing differences for words focused by a context question. They did find that a region prior to the target word was read faster in the focus condition; however, they pointed out that this result may have arisen, at least in part, because of repetition of a word from the focusing question.…”

Semantic illusion depends on information structure: ERP evidence

“…The accented word is marked in capitals). Several behavioral studies suggest that the focused information receives more attention and attains deeper processing than non-focused information (Cutler and Fodor, 1979;Birch and Rayner, 1997;Ward and Sturt, 2007;Sanford et al, 2006). In a recent ERP study, Li et al (2008a) found that more resources were devoted to information that was marked as new (focus) by accentuation.…”