Mulders Iris, Szendrői Kriszta
Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS, Utrecht University Utrecht, Netherlands.
UCL Linguistics, Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London London, UK.
Front Psychol. 2016 Mar 11;7:150. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00150. eCollection 2016.
In three visual-world eye tracking studies, we investigated the processing of sentences containing the focus-sensitive operator alleen 'only' and different pitch accents, such as the Dutch Ik heb alleen SELDERIJ aan de brandweerman gegeven 'I only gave CELERY to the fireman' versus Ik heb alleen selderij aan de BRANDWEERMAN gegeven 'I only gave celery to the FIREMAN'. Dutch, like English, allows accent shift to express different focus possibilities. Participants judged whether these utterances match different pictures: in Experiment 1 the Early Stress utterance matched the picture, in Experiment 2 both the Early and Late Stress utterance did, and in Experiment 3 neither did. We found that eye-gaze patterns start to diverge across the conditions already as the indirect object is being heard. Our data also indicate that participants perform anticipatory eye-movements based on the presence of prosodic focus during auditory sentence processing. Our investigation is the first to report the effect of varied prosodic accent placement on different arguments in sentences with a semantic operator, alleen 'only', on the time course of looks in the visual world paradigm. Using an operator in the visual world paradigm allowed us to confirm that prosodic focus information immediately gets integrated into the semantic parse of the proposition. Our study thus provides further evidence for fast, incremental prosodic focus processing in natural language.
在三项视觉世界眼动追踪研究中，我们调查了包含焦点敏感算子“alleen”（意为“仅”）和不同音高重音的句子的处理过程，例如荷兰语句子Ik heb alleen SELDERIJ aan de brandweerman gegeven（意为“我只给消防员芹菜”）与Ik heb alleen selderij aan de BRANDWEERMAN gegeven（意为“我只给消防员芹菜”）。与英语一样，荷兰语允许通过重音转移来表达不同的焦点可能性。参与者判断这些话语是否与不同的图片匹配：在实验1中，早期重音的话语与图片匹配，在实验2中，早期和晚期重音的话语都与图片匹配，而在实验3中，两者都不匹配。我们发现，在听到间接宾语时，不同条件下的眼动注视模式就已经开始出现差异。我们的数据还表明，参与者在听觉句子处理过程中会根据韵律焦点的存在进行预期眼动。我们的研究首次报告了在视觉世界范式中，语义算子“alleen”（意为“仅”）的句子中，不同韵律重音位置对不同论元的影响以及注视时间进程。在视觉世界范式中使用算子使我们能够确认韵律焦点信息会立即整合到命题的语义解析中。因此，我们的研究为自然语言中快速、增量的韵律焦点处理提供了进一步的证据。
