Grammar is background in sentence processing
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
Documents
- manuscript_accept_til hjemmeside_v090920
Accepted author manuscript, 633 KB, PDF document
Boye and Harder (2012) claim that the grammatical-lexical distinction has to do with discourse prominence: lexical elements can convey discursively primary (or foreground) information, whereas grammatical elements cannot (outside corrective contexts). This paper reports two experiments that test this claim. Experiment 1 was a letter detection study, in which readers were instructed to mark specific letters in the text. Experiment 2 was a text-change study, in which participants were asked to register omitted words. Experiment 2 showed a main effect of word category: readers attend more to words in lexical elements (e.g. full verbs) than to those in grammatical elements (e.g. auxiliaries). Experiment 1 showed an interaction: attention to letters in focused constituents increased more for grammatical words than for lexical words. The results suggest that the lexical-grammatical contrast does indeed guide readers’ attention to words.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Journal | Language and Cognition |
Volume | 13 |
Issue number | 1 |
Pages (from-to) | 128-153 |
ISSN | 1866-9808 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2021 |
- Faculty of Humanities - grammar, attention, lexicon, focus, letter detection, change blindness, sentence processing
Research areas
Number of downloads are based on statistics from Google Scholar and www.ku.dk
No data available
ID: 248233294