Department of Psychology, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA, USA.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2021 Jan;74(1):179-186. doi: 10.1177/1747021820949155. Epub 2020 Sep 9.
Previous research suggests that language comprehenders are sensitive to the presence of focus-sensitive particles-words like and that are effective at marking the focus of the sentence. In addition to signalling linguistic focus, these words can also establish a semantic contrast between the focused element and an alternate set. For example, the phrase places linguistic focus on and may also prompt comprehenders to anticipate a set of upcoming entities that stand in semantic contrast to . We tested this possibility in an eyetracking-while-reading experiment that systematically crossed structure (focus vs. noun-phrase coordination) with predictability of an upcoming target noun (predictable vs. unpredictable). Whereas first-pass reading time showed a robust predictability effect for the coordination condition, the effect was eliminated for the focus condition. Later eyetracking measures revealed main effects of both predictability and syntactic structure. Overall, the results suggest that language comprehenders rapidly make use of the cue and may use this cue to begin anticipating a set of upcoming sentence continuations during online sentence processing.
先前的研究表明，语言理解者对焦点敏感粒子（如 和 等，这些词可以有效地标记句子的焦点）很敏感。除了表示语言焦点外，这些词还可以在焦点元素和另一个集合之间建立语义对比。例如，短语 将语言焦点放在 上，并可能促使理解者预测一组与 语义相对立的即将到来的实体。我们在一个眼动阅读实验中检验了这种可能性，该实验系统地交叉了结构（焦点与名词短语协调）和即将到来的目标名词的可预测性（可预测与不可预测）。虽然首次阅读时间对协调条件表现出了很强的可预测性效应，但这种效应在焦点条件下消失了。后续的眼动测量结果显示了可预测性和句法结构的主要影响。总的来说，这些结果表明，语言理解者可以快速利用线索 ，并可能在在线句子处理过程中利用这个线索开始预测一组即将到来的句子延续。
