TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kentner, Gerrit
A1  - Vasishth, Shravan
T1  - Prosodic focus marking in silent reading: Effects of discourse context and rhythm
T2  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - Understanding a sentence and integrating it into the discourse depends upon the identification of its focus, which, in spoken German, is marked by accentuation. In the case of written language, which lacks explicit cues to accent, readers have to draw on other kinds of information to determine the focus. We study the joint or interactive effects of two kinds of information that have no direct representation in print but have each been shown to be influential in the reader's text comprehension: (i) the (low-level) rhythmic-prosodic structure that is based on the distribution of lexically stressed syllables, and (ii) the (high-level) discourse context that is grounded in the memory of previous linguistic content. Systematically manipulating these factors, we examine the way readers resolve a syntactic ambiguity involving the scopally ambiguous focus operator auch (engl. “too”) in both oral (Experiment 1) and silent reading (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments attest that discourse context and local linguistic rhythm conspire to guide the syntactic and, concomitantly, the focus-structural analysis of ambiguous sentences. We argue that reading comprehension requires the (implicit) assignment of accents according to the focus structure and that, by establishing a prominence profile, the implicit prosodic rhythm directly affects accent assignment.
KW  - linguistic rhythm
KW  - focus
KW  - accent
KW  - reading
KW  - implicit prosody
KW  - syntactic parsing
KW  - sentence comprehension
KW  - eye tracking
Y1  - 2016
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/51873
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-518731
SN  - 1664-1078
N1  - Copyright © 2016 Kentner and Vasishth. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
VL  - 7
IS  - Art. 319
SP  - 1
EP  - 19
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  -