Arslan, Seçkin

Aydin, Özgür

Uzun, İpek Pınar

English

Archive Ouverte en Sciences de l'Information et de la Communication

Pre-verbal focus in Turkish: An eye-tracking during reading study 
İpek Pınar Uzun*, Seçkin Arslan**, Özgür Aydın* 
Ankara University*, Université Côte d’Azur, CNRS, BCL** 
In most languages, focused constituents are marked in a number of ways including syntactic canonicity 
and prosody. Being a flexible word-order language, Turkish uses both the syntactic and prosodic 
information to mark focused elements, as it allows for pre-verbal scrambling (İşsever, 2003). The 
canonical position for neutral focus in Turkish is taken to be the immediate preverbal position (see 
Kural, 1992; Taylan, 1984, among others). However, Göksel and Özsoy (2003) propose a ‘focus field’ 
(rather than a particular constituent position) which covers the entire preverbal area including the verb, 
which allows for percolation of prosodic features. To encapsulate, both the accounts suggest that focus 
occurs preverbally in Turkish, however, the immediate pre-verbal focus account assumes a canonical 
focus position while the focus field account presumes a flexible position shaped by sentence stress. Past 
research has evidenced that prosodic and articulatory processes are imposed during silent reading (see 
e.g., Ashby & Clifton, 2005; Fodor, 1998; Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989), and that inner speech aids 
sentence comprehension (e.g., Slowiaczek & Clifton, 1980, Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989; Carver, 1990). 
Building upon these studies and the above-mentioned focus accounts in Turkish, we aim to unveil the 
moment-by-moment incremental processing of preverbal focus in Turkish using an eye-movements 
monitoring experiment during naturalistic reading. 
We administered an eye-tracking during reading experiment to a group of 21 young adult 
participants who spoke Turkish as their native language. Our linguistic stimuli consisted of 24 sentence 
pairs, constructed as dialogues, with two conditions where the position of the focused element is 
manipulated: Preverbal (Pre-V, see 1) and Immediate Preverbal (iPreV, see 2). 
(1) A: Dükkanda  kim   kadını   gördü?  
       store.LOC who  woman.ACC see.PST 
B: Dükkanda  ÇOCUK   kadını   gördü 
store.LOC [child]FOC woman.ACC  see.PST  
‘A: Who saw the woman at the sore? B: The child saw the woman at the store.’ 
 
(2) A: Çocuk  dükkanda  kimi    gördü?  
child store.LOC who.ACC  see.PST 
B:  Çocuk  dükkanda  KADINI   gördü  
child store.LOC  [woman. ACC]FOC see.PST  
‘A: Who did the child see at the sore? B: The child saw the woman at the store.’ 
 
We manipulated the question in the first sentence of these dialogues so as to be able evoke 
different focus positions in our participants’ reading patterns. This is based on the idea that the position 
of who-pronouns, (i.e. either immediately preverbal object or preverbal subject) elicits an inherent focus 
position in the answer response. The participants were asked to read the dialogs silently while their eye-
movements were monitored with a SMI eye-tracker (SensoMotoric Instruments GmbH), and to respond 
to an end-of-trial acceptability judgement task which overtly required the participants’ judgement on 
whether the answer response was appropriate. 
Our results have shown that the participants found answer responses to be acceptable in 99% 
of the time (SD = 8) in the iPre-V condition while they did so in only 84% of the time (SD = 36) in the 
Pre-V condition. This difference in conditions was statistically significant, as verified by a generalized 
mixed-effects regression model (ß = 4.30, SE = 0.55, z = 7.77, p < .001; 95% CIs = [3.33, 5.55]). With 
regard to first and second pass fixation durations in the eye-movements data, we compared focused and 
non-focused readings at the immediate preverbal region (i.e. R3, see Figure 1) when this region received 
an inherent focused element (iPreV) and when not (PreV). Outputs from a set of linear mixed-effects 
regression models have shown no significant effects of condition for first pass fixation durations (ß=-
0.01, SE=0.03, t = -0.479, p > .05; 95% CIs = [17.77, 21.81]). However, for second pass fixation 
durations, condition differences were reliably significant (ß=0.39, SE = 0.15, t = 2.56, p < .05; 95% CIs 
= [39.13, 43.79]), evidencing that when the focused element was placed elsewhere but not the 
immediate preverbal region, the participants had longer second pass fixation durations than when the 
inherent focus was positioned immediately preverbally, due to increased amount of regressions for re-
reading.  
In conclusion, this study suggests that Turkish speakers anticipate focused elements to occur in 
the immediate pre-verbal region. These findings support claims made in previous studies that preverbal 
position allows for a neutral focus reading (Göksel & Özsoy, 2003; Kural, 1992; Taylan, 1984). This 
conclusion was compatible with both online fixation durations and end-of-trial acceptance rates: 
Turkish readers favoured immediate preverbal region as the focus position as we observed greater 
reading disruptions when focused element was elicited in non-immediate preverbal regions. However, 
it is important to note that it is difficult to tease apart whether and to what extant these second pass time 
differences between the iPreV and Pre-V conditions occurred due to focus position manipulations or to 
pure syntactic canonicity effects. A fututre study would address this using spoken sentence stimuli. 
 
Figure 1. First pass (A) and second pass (B) fixation durations per region of interest. 
 
Selected References 
Asbhy, J., & Clifton, C. (2005). The prosodic property of lexical stress affects eye movements during 
silent reading. Cognition (96): 89-100. 
Carver, R. (1990). Reading Rate: A Review of Research and Theory. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. 
Fodor, J.D. (1998). Learning to parse? Journal of Psycholinguistic Research(27), 285-319. 
Göksel, A., & Özsoy, A.S. (2003). dA: a focus/topic associated clitic in Turkish. Lingua, 113(11), 1143-
1167.  
İşsever, S. (2003). Information structure in Turkish: the word order–prosody interface. Lingua, 113(11), 
1025-1053.  
Kural, M. (1992). Properties of scrambling in Turkish. Unpublished Ms. Thesis, UCLA.  
Rayner, K., & Pollatsek, A. (1989). The Psychology of Reading. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. 
Slowiaczek, M.L., & Clifton, C. (1980). Subvocalization and reading for meaning. Journal of Verbal 
Learning and Verbal Behavior, 19(5), 573-582. 
Taylan, E.E. (1984). The function of word order in Turkish grammar. Berkeley: University of California 
Press. 


Pre-verbal focus in Turkish: An eye-tracking during reading study

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Pre-verbal focus in Turkish: An eye-tracking during reading study

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