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This article presents results of an exploratory investigation combining multimodal cohesion analysis and eye-tracking studies. Multimodal cohesion, as a tool of multimodal discourse analysis, goes beyond lin-guistic cohesive mechanisms to enable the construction of cross-modal discourse structures that system-atically relate technical details of audio, visual and verbal modalities. Patterns of multimodal cohesion from these discourse structures were used to design eye-tracking experiments and questionnaires in order to empirically investigate how auditory and visual cohesive cues affect attention and comprehen-sion. We argue that the cross-modal structures of cohesion revealed by our method offer a strong methodology for addressing empirical questions concerning viewers' comprehension of narrative settings and the comparative salience of visual, verbal and audio cues. Analyses are presented of the beginning of Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) and a sketch from Monty Python filmed in 1971. Our approach balances the narrative-based issue of how narrative elements in film guide meaning interpretation and the recipient -based question of where a film viewer's attention is directed during viewing and how this affects comprehension.
The aim of the doctoral project was to answer the question of whether the structural word-initial noun capitalization, as it can otherwise only be found in Luxembourgish alongside German, has a function that is advantageous for the reader. The overriding hypothesis was that an advantage is achieved by activating a syntactic category, namely the core of a noun phrase, through the parafoveal perception of the capital letters. This perception from the corner of the eye should make it possible to preprocess the following noun. As a result, sentence processing should be facilitated, which should ultimately be reflected in overall faster reading times and fixation durations.
The structure of the project includes three studies, some of which included different participant groups:
Study 1:
Study design: Semantic priming using garden-path sentences should bring out the functionality of noun capitalization for the reader
Participant groups: German natives reading German
Study 2:
Study design: same design as study 1, but in English
Participant groups:
English natives without any knowledge of German reading English
English natives who regularly read German reading English
German with high proficiency in English reading English
Study 3:
Study design:
Influence of the noun frequency on a potential preprocessing using the boundary paradigm; Study languages: German and English
Participant groups:
German natives reading German
English natives without any knowledge of German reading English
German with high proficiency in English reading English
Brief summary: The noun capitalization clearly has an impact on sentence processing in both German and English. It cannot be confirmed that this has a substantial, decisive advantage.