Processing contextual and lexical cues to focus: Evidence from eye movements in reading

Abstract

Three eye movement experiments investigated the interaction between contextual and lexical focus cues during reading. Context was used to focus on either the indirect or direct object of a double object construction, which was followed by a remnant continuation that formed either a congruous or incongruous contrast with the contextually-focused object. Experiment 1 demonstrated that remnants were more difficult to process when incongruous with the contextually-focused constituent, indicating that context was effective in specifying focus. Experiments 2 and 3 investigated the interaction between context and lexical focus arising from the particle only which specifies focus on the subsequent adjacent element. When only preceded both objects (Experiment 2), the conflict between lexical and contextual focus cues disrupted processing of the remnant element and was resolved in favor of the contextually-focused element. However, when only was placed between both objects (Experiment 3), cue-conflict disrupted processing earlier in the sentence, but did not appear to be fully resolved during on-line sentence processing. These findings reveal that the interplay between contextual and lexical cues to focus is important for establishing focus structure during on-line sentence processing.

Early Association of Prosodic Focus with alleen ‘only’: Evidence from Eye Movements in the Visual-World Paradigm

“…This is based on the expectation that if participants compute the relevant focal meaning component by the time they encounter the replacives, they would find them incongruous if they are mismatched. They found that the position of only evoked the expected focus effect on-line (see also Sauermann et al, 2013 ). This, however, manifested itself in longer reading times for the postreplacive region, rather than the replacive region itself.…”

Coreference and Focus in Reading Times

“…Linguistic focus directs subjects' attention toward particularly salient or important discourse referents during sentence processing. Studies such as Perfetti and Goldman (1974), Greene et al (1992), Almor (1999), Foraker and McElree (2007) and Sauermann et al (2013) have explored the effects of linguistic focus on subjects' processing of coreference. Greene et al (1992) offer a model of pronoun resolution within a rich discourse representation that recognizes syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors for referent focus.…”

Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2018)

“…Linguistic focus directs subjects' attention toward particularly salient or important discourse referents during sentence processing. Studies such as Perfetti and Goldman (1974), Greene et al (1992), Almor (1999), Foraker and McElree (2007) and Sauermann et al (2013) have explored the effects of linguistic focus on subjects' processing of coreference. Greene et al (1992) offer a model of pronoun resolution within a rich discourse representation that recognizes syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors for referent focus.…”