Early Association of Prosodic Focus with alleen 'only': Evidence from Eye Movements in the Visual-World Paradigm.

摘要: In three visual-world eye tracking studies, we investigated the processing of sentences containing focus-sensitive operator alleen 'only' and different pitch accents, such as Dutch Ik heb SELDERIJ aan de brandweerman gegeven 'I only gave CELERY to fireman' versus selderij BRANDWEERMAN celery FIREMAN'. Dutch, like English, allows accent shift express focus possibilities. Participants judged whether these utterances match pictures: in Experiment 1 Early Stress utterance matched picture, 2 both Late did, 3 neither did. We found that eye-gaze patterns start diverge across conditions already indirect object is being heard. Our data also indicate participants perform anticipatory eye-movements based on presence prosodic during auditory sentence processing. investigation first report effect varied placement arguments with a semantic operator, 'only', time course looks visual world paradigm. Using an paradigm allowed us confirm information immediately gets integrated into parse proposition. study thus provides further evidence for fast, incremental natural language.