Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
PLoS One. 2012;7(8):e42533. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0042533. Epub 2012 Aug 17.
The relationship between focus and new information has been unclear despite being the subject of several information structure studies. Here, we report an eye-tracking experiment that explored the relationship between them in on-line discourse processing in Chinese reading. Focus was marked by the Chinese focus-particle "shi", which is equivalent to the cleft structure "it was... who..." in English. New information was defined as the target word that was not present in previous contexts. Our results show that, in the target region, focused information was processed more quickly than non-focused information, while new information was processed more slowly than given information. These results reveal differences in processing patterns between focus and newness, and suggest that they are different concepts that relate to different aspects of cognitive processing. In addition, the effect of new/given information occurred in the post-target region for the focus condition, but not for the non-focus condition, suggesting a complex relationship between focus and newness in the discourse integration stage.
尽管已有多项信息结构研究探讨了焦点与新信息之间的关系，但它们之间的关系仍不明确。在此，我们报告了一项眼动实验，该实验探究了汉语阅读中在线语篇处理中两者之间的关系。焦点由汉语焦点助词“是”标记，与英语中的分裂结构“it was... who...”等效。新信息定义为在前文语境中不存在的目标词。我们的结果表明，在目标区域中，焦点信息的处理速度快于非焦点信息，而新信息的处理速度慢于已知信息。这些结果揭示了焦点和新异性在加工模式上的差异，表明它们是不同的概念，涉及认知加工的不同方面。此外，在焦点条件下，新/已知信息的影响出现在目标区域之后，但在非焦点条件下则没有，这表明在语篇整合阶段焦点和新异性之间存在复杂的关系。
