Mulders, I;
Szendrői, K;
(2016)
Early Association of Prosodic Focus with alleen 'only': Evidence from Eye Movements in the Visual-World Paradigm.
Frontiers in Psychology
, 7
, Article 150. 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00150.
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Abstract
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.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Early Association of Prosodic Focus with alleen 'only': Evidence from Eye Movements in the Visual-World Paradigm |
| Location: | Switzerland |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00150 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00150 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2016 Mulders and Szendrői. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. |
| Keywords: | anticipatory eye movements and predictions, eye tracking, focus, incremental language processing, marked stress, prosody, semantics, visual world paradigm |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Linguistics |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1485639 |
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