Yang Xiaohong, Chen Lijing, Yang Yufang
Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 4A Datun Road, , Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100101, China.
Mem Cognit. 2014 Feb;42(2):325-39. doi: 10.3758/s13421-013-0363-0.
A coherent discourse exhibits certain structures in that subunits of discourses are related to one another in various ways and in that subunits that contribute to the same discourse purpose are joined to create a larger unit so as to produce an effect on the reader. To date, this crucial aspect of discourse has been largely neglected in the psycholinguistic literature. In two experiments, we examined whether semantic integration in discourse context was influenced by the difference of discourse structure. Readers read discourses in which the last sentence was locally congruent but either semantically congruent or incongruent when interpreted with the preceding sentence. Furthermore, the last sentence was either in the same discourse unit or not in the same discourse unit as the preceding sentence, depending on whether they shared the same discourse purpose. Results from self-paced reading (Experiment 1) and eye tracking (Experiment 2) showed that discourse-incongruous words were read longer than discourse-congruous words only when the critical sentence and the preceding sentence were in the same discourse unit, but not when they belonged to different discourse units. These results establish discourse structure as a new factor in semantic integration and suggest that discourse effects depend both on the content of what is being said and on the way that the contents are organized.
连贯的语篇呈现出特定的结构，即语篇的各个子单元以各种方式相互关联，且为实现同一语篇目的的子单元相互连接，形成一个更大的单元，从而对读者产生影响。迄今为止，语篇的这一关键方面在心理语言学文献中很大程度上被忽视了。在两项实验中，我们研究了语篇语境中的语义整合是否受语篇结构差异的影响。读者阅读的语篇中，最后一句话在局部上是连贯的，但与前一句结合起来理解时，语义上要么连贯，要么不连贯。此外，根据最后一句话与前一句是否共享同一语篇目的，最后一句话要么与前一句在同一个语篇单元中，要么不在同一个语篇单元中。自定步速阅读实验（实验1）和眼动追踪实验（实验2）的结果表明，只有当关键句和前一句在同一个语篇单元中时，语篇中语义不连贯的词比语义连贯的词阅读时间更长，而当它们属于不同语篇单元时则不然。这些结果确立了语篇结构是语义整合中的一个新因素，并表明语篇效应既取决于所讲内容的实质，也取决于内容的组织方式。
