Leiden University Centre for Linguistics Leiden, Netherlands ; Education and Child Studies, Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Leiden University Leiden, Netherlands ; Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition Leiden, Netherlands.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2014 Oct 2;5:1124. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01124. eCollection 2014.
This study investigated how sentence formulation is influenced by a preceding discourse context. In two eye-tracking experiments, participants described pictures of two-character transitive events in Dutch (Experiment 1) and Chinese (Experiment 2). Focus was manipulated by presenting questions before each picture. In the Neutral condition, participants first heard "What is happening here?" In the Object or Subject Focus conditions, the questions asked about the Object or Subject character (What is the policeman stopping? Who is stopping the truck?). The target response was the same in all conditions (The policeman is stopping the truck). In both experiments, sentence formulation in the Neutral condition showed the expected pattern of speakers fixating the subject character (policeman) before the object character (truck). In contrast, in the focus conditions speakers rapidly directed their gaze preferentially only to the character they needed to encode to answer the question (the new, or focused, character). The timing of gaze shifts to the new character varied by language group (Dutch vs. Chinese): shifts to the new character occurred earlier when information in the question can be repeated in the response with the same syntactic structure (in Chinese but not in Dutch). The results show that discourse affects the timecourse of linguistic formulation in simple sentences and that these effects can be modulated by language-specific linguistic structures such as parallels in the syntax of questions and declarative sentences.
本研究调查了句子的构成如何受到前文话语语境的影响。在两项眼动实验中，参与者用荷兰语（实验 1）和汉语（实验 2）描述了两个字符及物事件的图片。通过在每张图片前呈现问题来操纵焦点。在中性条件下，参与者首先听到“这里发生了什么？”在对象或主语焦点条件下，问题询问的是对象或主语角色（警察在阻止谁？谁在阻止卡车？）。在所有条件下，目标反应都是相同的（警察正在阻止卡车）。在两项实验中，中性条件下的句子构成呈现出预期的模式，即说话者在注视对象角色（卡车）之前先注视主语角色（警察）。相比之下，在焦点条件下，说话者会迅速优先注视他们需要编码以回答问题的角色（新的或焦点角色）。注视新角色的时间变化因语言群体而异（荷兰语与汉语）：当问题中的信息可以用相同的句法结构在回答中重复时（汉语中，但在荷兰语中则不然），注视新角色的时间变化更早。研究结果表明，话语会影响简单句中语言构成的时间进程，并且这些影响可以通过语言特定的语言结构来调节，例如疑问句和陈述句在句法上的相似性。
