Linguistic Focus Promotes the Ease of Discourse Integration Processes in Reading Comprehension: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials

Haifeng Duan,Haihua Pan,Chin Lung Yang,Huili Zhang

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02718

Abstract

Psycholinguistic studies of focus processing have yielded varying results regarding how focus affects language processing. We report the results of an event-related potential (ERP) experiment that used question-answer pairs in a discourse to manipulate whether a target word was contextually focused, contrastively focused, contextually defocused, or contextually neutral. We found a negative-going waveform that was sustained in the time-course (250–800 ms after the target word onset) with a maximum over frontal-central scalp sites. As the structure of the discourse made the target word more focused, the negative-going deflection was systematically reduced. We also observed a frontal positive-going waveform that was larger for the focus-marked words relative to the neutral target word in an earlier time window (150–250 ms, P200), which may reflect increased attention allocated to the focused items. We propose that the reduced negative ERPs for the focused words reflects facilitation of meaning integration when focus functions to establish reference in the discourse representation. This can be attributed to extra attention paid to the focus-marked items that in turn promotes the prominence of focus-marked referent and prompts the contextual priming mechanism that facilitates the access of propositionally relevant items in text memory during reading.

Highlights

Understanding a sentence in a communicative context requires readers/listeners to make use of multiple cues to identify the information structure, i.e., the focus that signals the most prominent linguistic constituent in the sentence (Halliday, 1967) as compared to information that is presented as background
Information = Informational Status *p < 0.05, **p < 0.001. In this event-related brain potential study, we manipulated whether a target word was contextually focused, contrastively focused, contextually defocused, or contextually neutral in a single experiment
We found that the focus-marked target words elicited a larger frontal P200 relative to the neutral condition, followed by a central-frontal negative-going waveform that was sustained in the time-course

Summary

Introduction

Understanding a sentence in a communicative context requires readers/listeners to make use of multiple cues to identify the information structure, i.e., the focus that signals the most prominent linguistic constituent in the sentence (Halliday, 1967) as compared to information that is presented as background. The word Jennifer, is contrastively focused because such a focus is to express corrective or exhaustive identification of its referents (i.e., It was Jennifer instead of Mary who was kissed by John) These referents are assigned narrow focus—one that is made by virtue of specified contextual information—which is in contrast with the circumstance where no specified information constraint is given—i.e., the question (1c) and its answer, which could be either (1d) or (1e). In such cases, a wide/broad focus reading is computed and the entire sentence, namely (1d) and (1e), would be interpreted as new information (Cinque, 1993)

Methods

Results

Conclusion