Sentence processing and lexical access: The influence of the focus-identifying task

Blutner, Reinhard; Sommer, Rosemarie

doi:10.1016/0749-596x(88)90061-7

Cited by 48 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Admittedly, even when knowing the meaning of the prime and the visual target, less proficient learners might have had difficulties with the interpretation of the L2 sentences preventing the observation of reliable associative priming effects. In fact, associative priming effects depend on the comprehension and interpretation of the experimental sentence (Blutner & Sommer, 1988;Braun & Tagliapietra, 2009;Norris, Cutler, McQueen, & Butterfield, 2006;Tabossi, 1988;Williams, 1988). Assessing proficiency on the basis of the recognition of the filler trials tests the recognition of a large number of words and nonwords and provides an independent estimate of the non-native lexicon and L2 understanding.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On-line interpretation of intonational meaning in L2

Braun

Tagliapietra

2011

Language and Cognitive Processes

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Despite their relatedness, Dutch and German differ in the interpretation of a particular intonation contour, the hat pattern. In the literature, this contour has been described as neutral for Dutch, and as contrastive for German. A recent study supports the idea that Dutch listeners interpret this contour neutrally, compared to the contrastive interpretation of a lexically identical utterance realised with a double peak pattern. In particular, this study showed shorter lexical decision latencies to visual targets (e.g., PELIKAAN, “pelican”) following a contrastively related prime (e.g., flamingo, “flamingo”) only when the primes were embedded in sentences with a contrastive double peak contour, not in sentences with a neutral hat pattern. The present study replicates Experiment 1a of Braun and Tagliapietra (2009) with German learners of Dutch. Highly proficient learners of Dutch differed from Dutch natives in that they showed reliable priming effects for both intonation contours. Thus, the interpretation of intonational meaning in L2 appears to be fast, automatic, and driven by the associations learned in the native language

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

On-line interpretation of intonational meaning in L2

Braun

Tagliapietra

2011

Language and Cognitive Processes

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“…One way to encourage greater depth of processing on particular words in sentence contexts is to make them the semantic focus of their carrier sentences (Blutner & Sommer, 1988;Cutler & Fodor, 1979). Blutner and Sommer, for example, used cross-modal priming to study lexical ambiguity in the context of manipulations of sentence focus.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…When attention is directed to a prime in one of these ways, priming can arise even for contextually inappropriate meanings. In Blutner and Sommer (1988), for example, no priming was observed at 0 ms ISI for either meaning of ambiguous primes when a previously presented question focussed listeners' attention away from the primes, but there was priming of responses to associates of both the appropriate and the inappropriate meanings of the primes when the primes were in focus. When a given word is brought more fully to the listener's attention as being relevant for ongoing utterance interpretation, the lexical semantics of that word can be activated more strongly, and associative priming may thus be found even for a meaning of that word that ultimately does not Wt into that interpretation.…”

Section: Conceptual Activationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…They appeared, however, relatively late in long sentence contexts which were heavily biased towards one or other meaning of the (ambiguous) primes. Similarly, in yet other experiments, discourse context was provided in the form of a context sentence which preceded the sentence containing the prime (Blutner & Sommer, 1988;Swinney, 1979, Experiment 1). The presence of a discourse context may encourage listeners to process sentences in greater depth and incorporate more of the meaning of the prime into the interpretation of the sentence.…”

Section: Cross-modal Associative Primingmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Phonological and conceptual activation in speech comprehension

Norris

Cutler

McQueen

et al. 2006

Cognitive Psychology

100

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, who originated the cross-modal priming task and thus signiWcantly furthered the study of spoken-language processing, died in April 2006. This paper is dedicated to his memory. AbstractWe propose that speech comprehension involves the activation of token representations of the phonological forms of current lexical hypotheses, separately from the ongoing construction of a conceptual interpretation of the current utterance. In a series of cross-modal priming experiments, facilitation of lexical decision responses to visual target words (e.g., time) was found for targets that were semantic associates of auditory prime words (e.g., date) when the primes were isolated words, but not when the same primes appeared in sentence contexts. Identity priming (e.g., faster lexical decisions to visual date after spoken date than after an unrelated prime) appeared, however, both with isolated primes and with primes in prosodically neutral sentences. Associative priming in sentence contexts only emerged when sentence prosody involved contrastive accents, or when sentences were terminated immediately after the prime. Associative priming is therefore not an automatic consequence of speech processing. In no experiment was there associative priming from embedded words (e.g., sedate-time), but there was inhibitory identity priming (e.g., sedate-date) from embedded primes in sentence contexts. Speech comprehension therefore appears to involve separate distinct activation both of token phonological word representations and of conceptual word representations. Furthermore, both of these types of representation are distinct from the long-term memory representations of word form and meaning.

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“…The focus of the sentence may be indicated in a number of different ways. For example, focus has been implemented through the use of wh-questions (e.g., Birch & Rayner, 1997;Blutner & Sommer, 1988;Cutler & Fodor, 1979), there-insertion sentences (e.g., Birch & Garnsey, 1995), and it-cleft sentence constructions (e.g., Birch & Garnsey, 1995;Birch & Rayner, 1997). Focusing is thought to enhance the relative availability of concepts in memory in spoken language comprehension (Gernsbacher & Jescheniak, 1995;Gernsbacher & Shroyer, 1989) and in reading (Birch & Garnsey, 1995;Birch & Rayner, 1997;Carpenter & Just, 1977;Singer, 1976).…”

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confidence: 99%

Focus as a contextual priming mechanism in reading

1998

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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 ...

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Sentence processing and lexical access: The influence of the focus-identifying task

Cited by 48 publications

References 18 publications

On-line interpretation of intonational meaning in L2

On-line interpretation of intonational meaning in L2

Phonological and conceptual activation in speech comprehension

Focus as a contextual priming mechanism in reading

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