Eye Movements Reveal Delayed Use of Construction-Based Pragmatic Information During Online Sentence Reading: A Case of Chinese Lian…dou Construction.

Chuanli Zang,Li Zhang,Xiaoming Jiang,Xiaolin Zhou,Zhewen He,Manman Zhang,Xuejun Bai,Guoli Yan

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02211

Abstract

An event-related potential (ERP) study demonstrated that construction-based pragmatic constraints in Chinese (e.g., lian…dou that constrains a low-likelihood event and is similar to even in English) can rapidly influence sentence comprehension and the mismatch of such constraints would lead to increased neural activity on the mismatching word. Here we examine to what extent readers’ eye movements can instantly reveal the difficulties of mismatching constraints when participants read sentences with the structure lian + determiner phrase + object noun + subject noun + dou + verb phrase (VP) + final commenting clause. By embedding high-likelihood or neutral events in the construction, we created incongruent and underspecified sentences and compared such sentences with congruent ones describing events of low expectedness. Relative to congruent sentences, the VP region of incongruent sentences showed no significant differences on first-pass reading time measures, but the total fixation duration was reliably longer. Moreover, readers made more regressions from the VP and the sentence-final region to previous regions in the incongruent than the congruent condition. These findings suggest that the effect of pragmatic constraints is observable during naturalistic sentence reading, reflecting the activation of the construction-based pragmatic information for the late integration of linguistic and extra-linguistic information at sentential level.

Highlights

To make sense of linguistic inputs in different communicative contexts, readers need to incrementally build linguistic representations based on local semantic constraint, and integrate this local representation with extra-linguistic information in real time (Zhou et al, 2009, 2010; Jiang and Zhou, 2012; Jiang et al, 2013a,b; Clifton et al, 2016).Pragmatic Constraints in Chinese ReadingThe negotiation of meanings derived at different representation levels determines when and how the pragmatic meaning is activated and used during sentence comprehension (PolitzerAhles et al, 2013)
It is evident that event-related potential (ERP) research typically adopts rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm in which one word at a certain time is presented in the screen and participants are required to fixate the target and avoid making eye movements
The wordby-word presentation prevents natural eye movement behavior that usually occurs during normal reading such as parafoveal processing, word skipping, refixation, and regression

Summary

Introduction

To make sense of linguistic inputs in different communicative contexts, readers need to incrementally build linguistic representations based on local semantic constraint, and integrate this local representation with extra-linguistic (e.g., pragmatic) information in real time (Zhou et al, 2009, 2010; Jiang and Zhou, 2012; Jiang et al, 2013a,b; Clifton et al, 2016).Pragmatic Constraints in Chinese ReadingThe negotiation of meanings derived at different representation levels determines when and how the pragmatic meaning is activated and used during sentence comprehension (PolitzerAhles et al, 2013). Some studies showed a relatively late starting (∼400 ms) but prolonged negativity effect on the words (e.g., sentence-initial scalar quantifiers some kids were riding bicycles) preceded by a context mismatching the pragmatic meaning of the quantifier (e.g., a picture showing all kids were riding bicycles) This negative response indexes a process of canceling or inhibiting initially built pragmatic representation, implicitly indicating that pragmatic information is instantly used for online sentence processing (PolitzerAhles et al, 2013). In the present study we used the same stimuli from an ERP study conducted by Jiang et al (2013a) and employed an eye movement tracking technique to examine the precise time course of processing Chinese construction-based pragmatic information during normal sentence reading

Methods

Results

Conclusion