Sensitivity to salience
- 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 theSentence 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.…
Author details: | Juliane BurmesterORCiDGND, Antje SauermannORCiDGND, Katharina Spalek, Isabell WartenburgerORCiDGND |
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DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2018.1428758 |
ISSN: | 2327-3798 |
ISSN: | 2327-3801 |
Title of parent work (English): | Language, cognition and neuroscience |
Subtitle (English): | linguistic vs. visual cues affect sentence processing and pronoun resolution |
Publisher: | Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group |
Place of publishing: | Abingdon |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Date of first publication: | 2018/01/30 |
Publication year: | 2018 |
Release date: | 2022/03/30 |
Tag: | Topic status; antecedent choice; eye gaze; reading times; visual context |
Volume: | 33 |
Issue: | 6 |
Number of pages: | 18 |
First page: | 784 |
Last Page: | 801 |
Funding institution: | German Research Foundation (DFG)German Research Foundation (DFG) [SFB 632]; German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)Federal Ministry of Education & Research (BMBF) [01UG1411]; University of Potsdam |
Organizational units: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Strukturbereich Kognitionswissenschaften / Department Linguistik |
DDC classification: | 4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik |
License (German): | CC-BY-NC-ND - Namensnennung, nicht kommerziell, keine Bearbeitungen 4.0 International |