Effect on Comprehension of Preposed versus Postposed Adverbial Phrases

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this paper, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials such as In the park.... Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted to test the ‘Discourse Framing Hypothesis’ according to which preposed adverbials can be seen as frame builders announcing that incoming contents satisfy the same informational criterion specified by the adverbial. Our results indicate that spatial adverbials do not play the same role when they are in sentence-initial and in sentence-final position. These results are discussed in the framework of Zwaan’s Event Indexing Model.     

Competition Between Primary and Non-Primary Relations During Sentence Comprehension

The four eye-tracking experiments reported examined the way in which Adjunct Predicates (APs) located at the beginning of French sentences of the type Tired (feminine/masculine) of calling the woman (s/he) left the room are interpreted and interact with syntactic parsing strategies. The results suggest that the first NP (the woman) was initially interpreted as the potential AP gender controller. Moreover, in the case of gender agreement (the woman is the one who is tired) the syntactic status of the first NP (either the object of the preceding verb or the subject of the main verb) apparently remained ambiguous until the main verb was reached. The implications of these results for Frazier and Clifton's (1996) Construal Theory are discussed.