Nomen est omen: Investigating the dominance of nouns in word comprehension with eye movement analyses

Abstract

Although nouns are easily learned in early stages of lexical development, their role in adult word and text comprehension remains unexplored thus far. To investigate the role of different word classes (open-class words: nouns, adjectives, verbs; closed-class words: pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, etc.), 141 participants read a transposed German text while recording eye movements. Subsequently, participants indicated words they found difficult and reproduced the story. Then, participants were presented an untransposed text version while also tracking eye movements. Word difficulty, subjectively assessed by an interview and objectively by eye movement criteria (general fixation rate, number of fixations on specific words), text comprehension scores, and regressive fixations from one word class to another in the transposed text indicated that the noun was the most influential word class in enhancing the comprehension of other words. Developmental, intercultural, and neurophysiological aspects of noun dominance are discussed.

Gaze behaviour and linguistic processing of dynamic text in print interpreting

“…The first or the second landing point of the regression is a noun in 74% of the cases, even if less than 30% of all words of the data are nouns. This is in line with the findings of Furtner et al (2009) according to which readers recur their fixations to nouns more than to words of other parts of speech in order to enhance the comprehension of the surrounding words. When the first or the second landing point is not a noun, it is most likely a verb or an adjective: indeed, the first or the second landing point is a content word in 91% of the cases.…”

“…The fact that the lexical hierarchy that can be found here is the same as the one typically observed in the acquisition of language (O'Grady 1987;Furtner et al 2009) reflects the cognitive processing of language by which the meaning is being constructed. This, in turn, suggests that there is a relationship between the gaze behaviour and the linguistic processing of dynamic text.…”

“…Nouns, which are primary elements, are the most likely landing points of regressions (Furtner et al 2009). …”

“…Verbs, for instance, have a more fragmented meaning. The referents of verbs are not "present" in the perceptive field as concretely as the referents of nouns (Gentner 1982;Maratsos 1991;Caselli et al 1995, Furtner et al 2009). Verbs and adjectives are "secondary" elements.…”

“…They depend on a relationship to at least one secondary element. Because of this lexical hierarchy, children tend to learn first most of all nouns, then verbs and adjectives, and the function words are the last ones to be acquired (Furtner et al 2009). …”