Early Association of Prosodic Focus with alleen 'only': Evidence from Eye Movements in the Visual-World Paradigm.

Iris Mulders,Kriszta Szendrői

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00150

Iris Mulders, Kriszta Szendrői

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00150

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Abstract

In three visual-world eye tracking studies, we investigated the processing of sentences containing the focus-sensitive operator alleen ‘only’ and different pitch accents, such as the Dutch Ik heb alleen SELDERIJ aan de brandweerman gegeven ‘I only gave CELERY to the fireman’ versus Ik heb alleen selderij aan de BRANDWEERMAN gegeven ‘I only gave celery to the FIREMAN’. Dutch, like English, allows accent shift to express different focus possibilities. Participants judged whether these utterances match different pictures: in Experiment 1 the Early Stress utterance matched the picture, in Experiment 2 both the Early and Late Stress utterance did, and in Experiment 3 neither did. We found that eye-gaze patterns start to diverge across the conditions already as the indirect object is being heard. Our data also indicate that participants perform anticipatory eye-movements based on the presence of prosodic focus during auditory sentence processing. Our investigation is the first to report the effect of varied prosodic accent placement on different arguments in sentences with a semantic operator, alleen ‘only’, on the time course of looks in the visual world paradigm. Using an operator in the visual world paradigm allowed us to confirm that prosodic focus information immediately gets integrated into the semantic parse of the proposition. Our study thus provides further evidence for fast, incremental prosodic focus processing in natural language.

Highlights

Recall that in Experiment 1, we found that the difference between conditions in the looks targeting the ‘fireman’ seems to start already before the indirect object was heard
Like in Experiments 1 and 2, we focus only on the significant interactions between Visual AoI and Condition, as those are the relevant findings for our research question
If the sentence would continue with duiker ‘diver’, it would match the picture; and in the ES condition we do find marginally more time is being spent looking at the ‘diver’ than in the LS condition, right before the indirect object is heard

Summary

Introduction

Recall that in Experiment 1, we found that the difference between conditions in the looks targeting the ‘fireman’ seems to start already before the indirect object was heard. We did expect more looks targeting the ‘fireman’ in the ES condition, we did not expect this to happen until after the indirect object de brandweerman ‘the fireman’ was heard. We believe that this increase in looks targeting the ‘fireman’ in the ES condition is anticipatory. Our hypothesis is that in a picture verification task, participants employ an unconscious strategy when performing the task: they start out with the assumption that the utterance will match the picture

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