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1 results

  • Grammar is background in sentence processing

  • MARIE HERGET CHRISTENSEN, LINE BURHOLT KRISTENSEN, NICOLINE MUNCK VINTHER, KASPER BOYE
  • Journal:
    Language and Cognition / Volume 13 / Issue 1 / March 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    12 October 2020, pp. 128-153

  • 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.