TY  - GEN
A1  - Gotzner, Nicole
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
A1  - Spalek, Katharina
T1  - The impact of focus particles on the recognition and rejection of contrastive alternatives
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - The semantics of focus particles like only requires a set of alternatives (Rooth, 1992). In two experiments, we investigated the impact of such particles on the retrieval of alternatives that are mentioned in the prior context or unmentioned. The first experiment used a probe recognition task and showed that focus particles interfere with the recognition of mentioned alternatives and the rejection of unmentioned alternatives relative to a condition without a particle. A second lexical decision experiment demonstrated priming effects for mentioned and unmentioned alternatives (compared with an unrelated condition) while focus particles caused additional interference effects. Overall, our results indicate that focus particles trigger an active search for alternatives and lead to a competition between mentioned alternatives, unmentioned alternatives, and the focused element.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 517 
KW  - focus particles
KW  - alternative-set semantics
KW  - probe recognition task
KW  - lexical decision task
KW  - competitive inhibition
Y1  - 2019
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-413420
SN  - 1866-8364
IS  - 517
ER  - 
TY  - GEN
A1  - Burmester, Juliane
A1  - Sauermann, Antje
A1  - Spalek, Katharina
A1  - Wartenburger, Isabell
T1  - Sensitivity to salience
BT  - linguistic vs. visual cues affect sentence processing and pronoun resolution
T2  - Postprints der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe
N2  - Sentence comprehension is optimised by indicating entities as salient through linguistic (i.e., information-structural) or visual means. We compare how salience of a depicted referent due to a linguistic (i.e., topic status) or visual cue (i.e., a virtual person’s gaze shift) modulates sentence comprehension in German. We investigated processing of sentences with varying word order and pronoun resolution by means of self-paced reading and an antecedent choice task, respectively. Our results show that linguistic as well as visual salience cues immediately speeded up reading times of sentences mentioning the salient referent first. In contrast, for pronoun resolution, linguistic and visual cues modulated antecedent choice preferences less congruently. In sum, our findings speak in favour of a significant impact of linguistic and visual salience cues on sentence comprehension, substantiating that salient information delivered via language as well as the visual environment is integrated in the current mental representation of the discourse.
T3  - Zweitveröffentlichungen der Universität Potsdam : Humanwissenschaftliche Reihe - 454 
KW  - topic status
KW  - eye gaze
KW  - visual context
KW  - reading times
KW  - antecedent choice
Y1  - 2018
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-412838
IS  - 454
ER  -