Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-26T13:13:48.104Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Grammar is background in sentence processing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2020

MARIE HERGET CHRISTENSEN ,
LINE BURHOLT KRISTENSEN ,
NICOLINE MUNCK VINTHER  and
KASPER BOYE
MARIE HERGET CHRISTENSEN
Affiliation:
Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
LINE BURHOLT KRISTENSEN
Affiliation:
Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
NICOLINE MUNCK VINTHER
Affiliation:
Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
KASPER BOYE
Affiliation:
Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Boye and Harder (2012) claim that the grammatical–lexical distinction has to do with discourse prominence: lexical elements can convey discursively primary (or foreground) information, whereas grammatical elements cannot (outside corrective contexts). This paper reports two experiments that test this claim. Experiment 1 was a letter detection study, in which readers were instructed to mark specific letters in the text. Experiment 2 was a text-change study, in which participants were asked to register omitted words. Experiment 2 showed a main effect of word category: readers attend more to words in lexical elements (e.g., full verbs) than to those in grammatical elements (e.g., auxiliaries). Experiment 1 showed an interaction: attention to letters in focused constituents increased more for grammatical words than for lexical words. The results suggest that the lexical–grammatical contrast does indeed guide readers’ attention to words.

Keywords

attentiongrammarlexiconfocusletter detectionchange blindnesssentence processing.
Type
Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , March 2021 , pp. 128 - 153
Check for updates
Copyright
© UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This work was supported by the ‘Excellence Programme for Interdisciplinary Research’ at the University of Copenhagen. Declarations of interest: none.

References

references

Bates, B., Maechler, M., Bolker, & Walker, S. (2014). lme4: linear mixed-effects models using Eigen and S4. R package version 1.1-6. Online https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/lme4/index.html.Google Scholar
Bennis, H., Prins, R. & Vermeulen, J. (1983). Lexical-semantic versus syntactic disorders in aphasia: the processing of prepositions. Publikaties van het Instituut voor Algemene Taalwerenschap 40, 1–32.Google Scholar
Boye, K. & Bastiaanse, R. (2018). Grammatical versus lexical words in theory and aphasia: integrating linguistics and neurolinguistics. Glossa 3(1), 29. doi:http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.436CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boye, K. & Harder, P. (2012). A usage-based theory of grammatical status and grammaticalization. Language 88, 1–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bredart, S. & Modolo, K. (1988). Moses strikes again: focalization effects on a semantic illusion. Acta Psychologica 67(2), 135–144.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christensen, M. H. (2015a). Eksperimentelt design og dets konsekvenser for fortolkningen af stimuli [Experimental design and its consequences for interpretation of stimuli]. Ny forskning i grammatik 22, 77–92.Google Scholar
Christensen, M. H. (2015b). Ændringsblindhed i sætningsprocessering i skriftlig dansk [Change blindness in sentence processing in written Danish]. In Hansen, I. Schoonderbeek & Hougaard, T. Thode (eds), MUDS (vol. 15, pp. 45–57). Aarhus: Institut for Æstetik og Kommunikation, Aarhus Universitet.Google Scholar
Corcoran, D. W. J. (1966). An acoustic factor in letter cancellation, Nature 210(5036), 658–658.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Drewnowski, A. & Healy, A. F. (1977). Detection errors on the and and: evidence for reading units larger than the word. Memory and Cognition 5(6), 636–647.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
DSL (Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab) (2007). KorpusDK. Online <http://ordnet.dk/korpusdk>..>Google Scholar
Engbert, R., Longtin, A. & Kliegl, R. (2002). A dynamical model of saccade generation in reading based on spatially distributed lexical processing. Vision Research 42(5), 621–636.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Engbert, R., Nuthmann, A., Richter, E. M. & Kliegl, R. (2005). SWIFT: a dynamical model of saccade generation during reading. Psychological Review 112(4), 777–813.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ferreira, F. & Patson, N. (2007). The ‘good enough’ approach to language comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass 1(1/2), 71–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foucambert, D. & Zuniga, M. (2012). Effects of grammatical categories on letter detection in continuous text. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 41(1), 33–49.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greenberg, S. N., Healy, A. F., Koriat, A. & Kreiner, H. (2004). The GO model: a reconsideration of the role of structural units in guiding and organizing text on line. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 11(3), 428–433.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greenberg, S. N., Inhoff, A. W. & Weger, U. W. (2006). The impact of letter detection on eye movement patterns during reading: reconsidering lexical analysis in connected text as a function of task. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 59(6), 987–995.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Greenberg, S. N. & Koriat, A. (1991). The missing-letter effect for common function words depends on their linguistic function in the phrase. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 17(6), 1051–1061.Google Scholar
Hadley, J. A. & Healy, A. F. (1991). When are reading units larger than the letter? Refinement of the unitization reading model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 17(6), 1062–1073.Google Scholar
Harley, H. (2006). English words: a linguistic introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.Google Scholar
Healy, A. F. (1976). Detection errors on the word the: evidence for reading units larger than letters. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 2(2), 235–242.Google ScholarPubMed
Healy, A. F. (1994). Letter detection: a window to unitization and other cognitive processes in reading text. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 1(3), 333–344.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Ishkhanyan, B., Sahraoui, H., Harder, P., Mogensen, J. & Boye, K. (2017). Grammatical and lexical pronoun dissociation in French speakers with agrammatic aphasia: a usage-based account and REF-based hypothesis. Journal of Neurolinguistics 44, 1–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koriat, A. & Greenberg, S. N. (1994). The extraction of phrase structure during reading: evidence from letter detection errors. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 1(3), 345–356.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Koriat, A., Greenberg, S. N. & Goldshmid, Y. (1991). The missing-letter effect in Hebrew: Word frequency or word function? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition 17(1), 66–80.Google Scholar
Kristensen, L. B. & Boye, K. (2016). Svært ved grammatikken – del 3 [Difficulties with grammar – part 3]. Logos 77, 27–31.Google Scholar
Kristensen, L. B., Wang, L., Petersson, K. M. & Hagoort, P. (2013). The interface between language and attention: prosodic focus marking recruits a general attention network in spoken language comprehension. Cerebral Cortex 23(8), 1836–1848.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information structure and sentence form: topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mardale, A. (2011). Prepositions as a semilexical category. Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics 13(2), 35–50.Google Scholar
Martínez-Ferreiro, S., Ishkhanyan, B., Rosell-Clarí, V. & Boye, K. (2019). Prepositions and pronouns in connected discourse of individuals with aphasia. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 33(6), 497–517.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McKoon, G., Ratchliff, R., Ward, G. & Sproat, R. (1993). Syntactic prominence effects on discourse processes. Journal of Memory & Language 32(5), 593–607.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moravcsik, J. E. & Healy, A. F. (1995). Effect of meaning on letter detection. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 21(1), 82–95.Google Scholar
Moravcsik, J. E. & Healy, A. F. (1998). Effect of syntactic role and syntactic prominence on letter detection. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 5(1), 96–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Peirce, J. W. (2007). PsychoPy – psychophysics software in Python. Journal of Neuroscience Methods 162(1/2), 8–13.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Price, J. M. (2008). The use of focus cues in healthy ageing. Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Glasgow.Google Scholar
R Core Team (2014). R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. Online <http://www.R-project.org/>..>Google Scholar
Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin 124(3), 372–422.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Rayner, K. (2009). The 35th Sir Frederick Bartlett lecture: eye movements and attention in reading, scene perception, and visual search. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 62(8), 1457–1506.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rayner, K., Ashby, J., Pollatsek, A. & Reichle, E. D. (2004). The effects of frequency and predictability on eye fixations in reading: implications for the E-Z Reader model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 30(4), 720–732.Google ScholarPubMed
Reichle, E. D., Pollatsek, A., Fisher, D. L. & Rayner, K. (1998). Toward a model of eye movement control in reading. Psychological Review 105(1), 125–127.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reichle, E. D., Pollatsek, A. & Rayner, K. (2006). E-Z Reader: a cognitive-control, serial-attention model of eye-movement behavior during reading. Cognitive Systems Research 7(1), 4–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reichle, E. D., Warren, T. & McConnell, K. (2009). Using E-Z Reader to model the effect of higher level language processing on eye movements during reading. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 16(1), 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rosenberg, B., Zurif, E., Brownnell, H., Garrett, M. & Bradley, D. (1985). Grammatical class effects in relation to normal and aphasic sentence processing. Brain & Language 26(2), 287–303.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roy-Charland, A. & Saint-Aubin, J. (2006). The interaction of word frequency and word class: a test of the GO model’s account of the missing-letter effect. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 59(1), 38–45.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Roy-Charland, A., Saint-Aubin, J., Klein, R. M. & Lawrence, M. (2007). Eye movements as direct tests of the GO model for the missing-letter effect. Perception and Psychophysics 69(3), 324–337.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Saint-Aubin, J. & Klein, R. M. (2001). The influence of parafoveal processing on the missing-letter effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 27(2), 318–334.Google ScholarPubMed
Saint-Aubin, J. & Poirier, M. (1997). The influence of the word function in the missing-letter effect: further evidence from French. Memory and Cognition 25(5), 666–676.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Sanford, A. J. (2002). Context, attention and depth of processing during interpretation. Mind & Language 17(1/2), 188–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sanford, A. J., Molle, J. & Emmott, C. (2006). Shallow processing and attention capture in written and spoken discourse. Discourse Processes 42(2), 109–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schachter, P. & Shopen, T. (2007). Parts-of-speech systems. In Shopen, T. (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, vol. 1: clause structure (pp. 1–60). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Segalowitz, S. J. & Lane, K. C. (2000). Lexical access of function versus content words. Brain and language 75(3), 376–389.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Smith, P. T. & Groat, A. (1979). Spelling patterns, letter cancellation and the processing of text. In McConkie, G. W., Kolers, P. A., Wrolstad, M. E. & Bouma, H. (eds), Processing of visible language (pp. 309–324). Boston, MA: Springer.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sturt, P., Sanford, A. J., Stewart, A. & Dawydiak, E. (2004). Linguistic focus and good-enough representations: an application of the change-detection paradigm. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 11(5), 882–888.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Vinther, N. M., Boye, K. & Kristensen, L. B. (2014). Grammatikken i baggrunden – opmærksomhed under læsning [Grammar in the background – attention during reading]. Nydanske Sprogstudier 47, 99–139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: PDF

Christensen et al. supplementary material

Appendix A

Download Christensen et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 164.7 KB
Supplementary material: PDF

Christensen et al. supplementary material

Appendix B

Download Christensen et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 36.7 KB