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Empirical Studies of the Construction of Discourse
Edited by Óscar Loureda, Inés Recio Fernández, Laura Nadal and Adriana Cruz
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 305] 2019
► pp. 229–252

Chapter 8
Expectation changes over time

How long it takes to process focus imposed by German sogar

| Heidelberg University Language and Cognition Lab, Heidelberg University
| Heidelberg University Language and Cognition Lab, Heidelberg University

Focus-sensitive particles (FP) are assumed to guide comprehenders’ attention by focalizing constituents and contrasting them to a set of alternatives (Blakemore 2002). However, here we show that the effect the German FP sogar asserts is not uniform across different sentences. We then present findings from a visual world study (Huettig et al. 2011) which show that, when the FP induces a high degree of expectation change during incremental online comprehension, visual attention to focalized targets is delayed. This suggests that (1) the system attempts to integrate the FP into the situation model immediately, but that (2) a full model update, including the calculation of new predictions about upcoming linguistic material is cognitively demanding in high expectation change contexts.

Keywords: focus particles, visual world paradigm, German, predictive processing, sogar , situation model
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Focus particles
  • 3.Overview of the experiments in the current study
    • 3.1Experiment 1: Determining the degree of expectation change
      • 3.1.1Method: Participants, stimuli, design
      • 3.1.2Results
      • 3.1.3Discussion
    • 3.2Experiment 2: Online processing of expectation change induced by sogar
      • 3.2.1Method: Participants, stimuli, design
      • 3.2.2Results: Data treatment and analysis
      • 3.2.3Discussion
  • 4.General discussion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 6 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.305.08ger
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