Enhancement and suppression effects resulting from information structuring in sentences

Memory and Cognition - Tập 37 - Trang 880-888 - 2009
Alison J. S. Sanford1, Jessica Price2, Anthony J. Sanford2
1Department of Psychology, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland
2University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland

Tóm tắt

Information structuring through the use of cleft sentences increases the processing efficiency of references to elements within the scope of focus. Furthermore, there is evidence that putting certain types of emphasis on individual words not only enhances their subsequent processing, but also protects these words from becoming suppressed in the wake of subsequent information, suggesting mechanisms of enhancement and suppression. In Experiment 1, we showed that clefted constructions facilitate the integration of subsequent sentences that make reference to elements within the scope of focus, and that they decrease the efficiency with reference to elements outside of the scope of focus. In Experiment 2, using an auditory text-change-detection paradigm, we showed that focus has similar effects on the strength of memory representations. These results add to the evidence for enhancement and suppression as mechanisms of sentence processing and clarify that the effects occur within sentences having a marked focus structure.

Tài liệu tham khảo

Almor, A. (1999). Noun-phrase anaphora and focus: The informational load hypothesis. Psychological Review, 106, 748–765. doi:10.1037/ 0033-295X.106.4.748 Anderson, A., Garrod, S. C., & Sanford, A. J. (1983). The accessibility of pronominal antecedents as a function of episode shift in narrative text. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 35, 427–440. Birch, S. L., Albrecht, J. E., & Myers, J. L. (2000). Syntactic focusing structures influence discourse processing. Discourse Processes, 30, 285–304. doi:10.1207/S15326950dp3003_4 Birch, S. L., & Garnsey, S. (1995). The effect of focus on memory for words in sentences. Journal of Memory & Language, 34, 232–267. doi:10.1006/jmla.1995.1011 Birch, S. [L.], & Rayner, K. (1997). Linguistic focus affects eye movements during reading. Memory & Cognition, 25, 653–660. Boersma, P., & Weenink, D. (2005). Praat: Doing phonetics by computer (Version 4.3.14) [Computer program]. Retrieved May 31, 2005, from www.praat.org. Bredart, S., & Modolo, K. (1988). Moses strikes again: Focalization effects on a semantic illusion. Acta Psychologica, 67, 135–144. doi:10.1016/0001-6918(88)90009-1 Cowles, H. W., Walenski, M., & Kluender, R. (2007). Linguistic and cognitive prominence in anaphor resolution: Topic, contrastive focus, and pronouns. Topoi, 26, 3–18. Cutler, A., & Fodor, J. A. (1979). Semantic focus and sentence comprehension. Cognition, 7, 49–59. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(79)90010-6 Delin, J. (1992). Properties of It-cleft presupposition. Journal of Semantics, 9, 289–306. doi:10.1080/01690969508407089 Emmott, C., Sanford, A. J., & Dawydiak, E. J. (2007). Stylistics meets cognitive science: Studying style in fiction and readers’ attention from an interdisciplinary perspective. Style, 41, 204–225. Foraker, S., & McElree, B. (2007). The role of prominence in pronoun resolution: Active versus passive representations. Journal of Memory & Language, 56, 357–383. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.07.004 Garnham, A. (2001). Mental models and the interpretation of anaphora. Hove, U.K.: Psychology Press. Gernsbacher, M. A. (1989). Mechanisms that improve referential access. Cognition, 32, 99–156. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(89)90001-2 Gernsbacher, M. A., & Jescheniak, J. D. (1995). Cataphoric devices in spoken discourse. Cognitive Psychology, 29, 24–58. doi:10.1006/ cogp.1995.1011 Gordon, P. C., & Scearce, K. A. (1995). Pronominalization and discourse coherence, discourse structure and pronoun interpretation. Memory & Cognition, 23, 313–323. Greene, S., McKoon, G., & Ratcliff, R. (1992). Pronoun resolution and discourse models. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 18, 266–283. doi:10.1037/0278-7393.18.2.266 Gundel, J. K. (1999). On three kinds of focus. In P. Bosch & R. van der Sandt (Eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive and computational perspectives (Studies in natural language processing) (pp. 293–305). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gundel, J. K., Hedberg, N. A., & Zacharski, R. (1993). Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language, 69, 274–307. Halliday, M. A. K. (1967). Notes on transitivity and theme in English— Part 2. Journal of Linguistics, 3, 199–244. Hedberg, N. A. (2000). The referential status of clefts. Language, 76, 891–920. Hobbs, J. P. (1985). Granularity. In A. Joshi (Ed.), Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 432–435). Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann. Hudson, S. B., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Dell, G. S. (1986). The effect of the discourse center on the local coherence of a discourse. In Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 96–101). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. Jackendoff, R. (1972). Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ladd, R. (1996). Intonational phonology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norris, D., Cutler, A., McQueen, J. M., & Butterfield, S. (2006). Phonological and conceptual activation in speech comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 53, 146–193. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2006.03.001 Pierrehumbert, J., & Hirschberg, J. (1990). The meaning of intonational contours in the interpretation of discourse. In P. Cohen, J. Morgan, & M. Pollack (Eds.), Intentions in communication (pp. 271–311). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Prince, E. F. (1978). A comparison of wh-clefts and it-clefts in discourse. Language, 54, 883–906. Rooth, M. (1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1, 75–116. Sanford, A. J. (2002). Context, attention and depth of processing during interpretation. Mind & Language, 17, 188–206. doi:10.1111/1468-0017.00195 Sanford, A. J., & Garrod, S. C. (1981). Understanding written language: Explanations in comprehension beyond the sentence. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley. Sanford, A. J., Moar, K., & Garrod, S. C. (1988). Proper names as controllers of discourse focus. Language & Speech, 31, 43–56. Sanford, A. J., & Sturt, P. (2002). Depth of processing in language comprehension: Not noticing the evidence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 6, 382–386. doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(02)01958-7 Sanford, A. J. S., Sanford, A. J., Filik, R., & Molle, J. (2005). Depth of lexical-semantic processing and sentential load. Journal of Memory & Language, 53, 378–396. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2005.05.004 Sanford, A. J. S., Sanford, A. J., Molle, J., & Emmott, C. (2006). Shallow processing and attention capture in written and spoken discourse. Discourse Processes, 42, 109–130. doi:10.1207/s15326950dp4202_2 Schneider, A., Eschman, S., & Zuccolotto, A. (2002). E-Prime user’s guide. Pittsburgh, PA: Psychology Software Tools, Inc. Simons, D. J., & Levin, D. T. (1997). Change blindness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 1, 261–267. doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(97)01080-2 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, 882–888.