Department of Psychology, College at Brockport, SUNY, Brockport, NY 14420, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2010 Sep;38(6):740-52. doi: 10.3758/MC.38.6.740.
Three experiments explored whether patterns of eye movements during reading might help explain syntactic prominence effects that are typically observed using reaction time tasks. Participants read sentences in which target words were in syntactically prominent or syntactically less prominent positions. Across all three experiments, using three types of syntactic prominence manipulations, there were fewer fixations and shorter reading times for words in more prominent positions, indicating that enhanced accessibility of syntactically prominent words is not caused by increased processing time. Rather, syntactic prominence appears to facilitate early encoding/lexical access and sentence integration processes while also, as shown previously, increasing activation of concepts in a comprehender's sentence or discourse representation. We propose that enhanced encoding and sentence integration processes can be attributed to an increase in attentional resources for more prominent concepts, and that this increase derives from readers' immediate sensitivity to informational prominence contours that are signaled by syntax.
三个实验探讨了阅读过程中的眼动模式是否有助于解释通常使用反应时任务观察到的句法突出效应。参与者阅读目标词处于句法突出或句法不那么突出位置的句子。在所有三个实验中，使用三种类型的句法突出性操作，在更突出位置的单词的注视次数更少，阅读时间更短，这表明句法突出的单词的可及性增强不是由于处理时间增加引起的。相反，句法突出似乎促进了早期的编码/词汇访问和句子整合过程，同时也如前所述，增加了理解者句子或语篇表示中的概念的激活。我们提出，增强的编码和句子整合过程可以归因于对更突出概念的注意力资源的增加，而这种增加源自读者对语法信号指示的信息突出轮廓的即时敏感性。
