Depth of lexical-semantic processing and sentential load

The text-change detection task has been used to show that changes are more readily detected for words that fall under narrow focus than broad focus (Sturt, Sanford, Stewart, & Dawydiak, 2004), and that narrow focus appears to lead to finer semantic distinctions being held in the representation of the word. The present experiments apply the same paradigm to investigate whether sentence processing load also influenced the detection of changes, and whether under a high load, semantic distinctions are held at a more crude (rougher grain) level than under low load. Load comparisons were made through subject- and object-extracted relative clauses (Experiment 1), and through referential load (Experiments 2 and 3). Higher loads resulted in poorer change detection, but the pattern of data differed from that obtained in focus manipulations. Experiment 4 explored the effects of referential load upon comprehension, confirming that comprehension did not break down under high-load conditions. In Experiment 5, the load effect was localized to the embedded verb. These results suggest that the effect of load differs from the effect of focus on lexical processing

Information structure influences depth of syntactic processing: Event-related potential evidence for the Chomsky illusion

Contains fulltext : 102636.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)Information structure facilitates communication between interlocutors by highlighting relevant information. It has previously been shown that information structure modulates the depth of semantic processing. Here we used event-related potentials to investigate whether information structure can modulate the depth of syntactic processing. In question-answer pairs, subtle (number agreement) or salient (phrase structure) syntactic violations were placed either in focus or out of focus through information structure marking. P600 effects to these violations reflect the depth of syntactic processing. For subtle violations, a P600 effect was observed in the focus condition, but not in the non-focus condition. For salient violations, comparable P600 effects were found in both conditions. These results indicate that information structure can modulate the depth of syntactic processing, but that this effect depends on the salience of the information. When subtle violations are not in focus, they are processed less elaborately. We label this phenomenon the Chomsky illusion.9 p