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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
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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
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Copyright
© UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2020

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Footnotes

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

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