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Abstract:
We employed sentences such as (1) in an
eye-movement experiment to investigate a number of hypotheses
about the effects of lexical frequency and sentence wrap-up on
eye-movement behaviour.
(1a) The manager spoke to the secretary. A
few days ago there had been a terrible misunderstanding.
(1b) The manager spoke to the ballerina. A
few days ago there had been a terrible misunderstanding.
(1c) The manager spoke to the secretary a few days
ago. There had been a terrible misunderstanding.
(1d) The manager spoke to the ballerina a few days
ago. There had been a terrible misunderstanding.
These sentences contained a high frequent
("secretary") or low frequent word ("ballerina"), which occurred
either at the end of the sentence or a few words before the
end.
The first claim that we tested was whether
sentences function as processing units (e.g., Fodor et al.,
1974), such that readers complete processing a sentence before
they move on to the next one. If this hypothesis is
correct, we may find spill-over effects of frequency in the
region "a few" when this region is part of the same sentence as
the critical word "secretary/ballerina" [(1c) and (1d)], but not
when this region is the beginning of the next sentence [(1a) and
(1b)]. Alternatively, if readers continue processing the
words in the previous sentence, spill-over effects should also be
observed when "a few" is the beginning of the next
sentence.
The second hypothesis that we explored was whether
sentence wrap- up affects the size of the frequency effect.
It has been shown (Mitchell & Green, 1978; Rayner et al.,
2000) that readers engage in additional processing when they
reach the end of a sentence. If the additional processing
due to sentence wrap-up affects the depth of lexical processing,
we expect a larger frequency effect when the critical word is at
the end of the sentence than when it is not. Finally, we
investigated whether lexical frequency and the presence of a full
stop have an effect on landing positions at the following
region.
Our results showed effects of frequency and
position of the full stop on the critical word
"secretary/ballerina" in first-pass times, but no interaction
between these factors. This indicates that the frequency
effect is unaffected by the additional processing that is due to
sentence wrap-up. We observed no effects of first-pass
reading times in the spill- over region. However, we did
find effects of frequency and full stop in regression path times
(first-pass including rereading) and an interaction between these
factors which indicated that the spill-over frequency effect was
larger when there was no intervening full stop than when an
intervening full stop was present. We conclude that readers
continued processing the critical word in the spill-over region
when both were part of the same sentence. In contrast, if
the spill-over region was the start of the next sentence, readers
did not continue processing the preceding word to the same
extent. Finally, the results showed an effect of full stop
on the landing position at "a few", but no effect of
frequency. This is consistent with the view that visual and
lexical factors have different effects on eye movements (e.g.,
Rayner, 1998).
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