TY - JOUR A1 - Vasishth, Shravan A1 - Kentner, Gerrit ED - Crocker, Matthew W. T1 - Prosodic focus marking in silent reading BT - effects of discourse context and rhythm JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - Understanding a sentence and integrating it into the discourse depends upon the identification of its focus, which, in spoken German, is marked by accentuation. In the case of written language, which lacks explicit cues to accent, readers have to draw on other kinds of information to determine the focus. We study the joint or interactive effects of two kinds of information that have no direct representation in print but have each been shown to be influential in the reader’s text comprehension: (i) the (low-level)rhythmic-prosodic structure that is based on the distribution of lexically stressed syllables, and (ii) the (high-level) discourse context that is grounded in the memory of previous linguistic content. Systematically manipulating these factors, we examine the way readers resolve a syntactic ambiguity involving the scopally ambiguous focus operator auch (engl. “too”) in both oral (Experiment 1) and silent reading (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments attest that discourse context and local linguistic rhythm conspire to guide the syntactic and, oncomitantly, the focus-structural analysis of ambiguous sentences. We argue that reading comprehension requires the (implicit) assignment of accents according to the focus structure and that, by establishing a prominence profile, the implicit prosodic rhythm directly affects accent assignment. KW - linguistic rhythm KW - eye tracking KW - sentence comprehension KW - syntactic parsing KW - implicit prosody Y1 - 2016 UR - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00319/full U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00319 VL - 2016 IS - 7 SP - 1 EP - 19 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - McCurdy, Kate A1 - Kentner, Gerrit A1 - Vasishth, Shravan T1 - Implicit prosody and contextual bias in silent reading JF - Journal of Eye Movement Research N2 - Eye-movement research on implicit prosody has found effects of lexical stress on syntactic ambiguity resolution, suggesting that metrical well-formedness constraints interact with syntactic category assignment. Building on these findings, the present eyetracking study investigates whether contextual bias can modulate the effects of metrical structure on syntactic ambiguity resolution in silent reading. Contextual bias and potential stress-clash in the ambiguous region were crossed in a 2 x 2 design. Participants read biased context sentences followed by temporarily ambiguous test sentences. In the three-word ambiguous region, main effects of lexical stress were dominant, while early effects of context were absent. Potential stress clash yielded a significant increase in first-pass regressions and re-reading probability across the three words. In the disambiguating region, the disambiguating word itself showed increased processing difficulty (lower skipping and increased re-reading probability) when the disambiguation engendered a stress clash configuration, while the word immediately following showed main effects of context in those same measures. Taken together, effects of lexical stress upon eye movements were swift and pervasive across first-pass and second-pass measures, while effects of context were relatively delayed. These results indicate a strong role for implicit meter in guiding parsing, one that appears insensitive to higher-level constraints. Our findings are problematic for two classes of models, the two-stage garden-path model and the constraint-based competition-integration model, but can be explained by a variation on the two-stage model, the unrestricted race model. KW - silent prosody KW - stress-clash KW - implicit meter KW - context KW - reanalysis KW - gardenpath model KW - competition-integration model KW - unrestricted race model KW - re-reading probability KW - skipping rate Y1 - 2013 SN - 1995-8692 VL - 6 IS - 2 PB - International Group for Eye Movement Research CY - Bern ER -