The comprehension of broad focus: Probing alternatives to verb phrases
| Autoři | |
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| Rok publikování | 2024 |
| Druh | Kapitola v knize |
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| Popis | Recent research has shown that comprehenders represent alternative meanings to single focused words online (for a review, see Gotzner & Spalek 2019), consistent with Rooth’s (1992) formal semantic account. However, focus can also take a scope over whole phrases such as the VP read the manuscript. We examined whether in these cases, too, alternatives are represented by testing for an interference effect of the particle only, which necessarily evokes alternatives. Using the probe recognition task, we first tested unmentioned alternatives to the constituent parts of VPs, to object nouns (Experiment 1, letter for manuscript) and verbs (Experiment 2, wrote for read). In Experiment 3, we tested alternatives to the whole phrase (wrote the letter). In all experiments, alternative probes were processed slower than unrelated ones. We found varying evidence of the interference effects of only with noun, verb and whole-phrase alternatives. Overall, this study does not provide support for the generalisation of the effects of only to larger units. Since our study was the first to use the probe recognition task with phrase-sized constituents, we discuss the methodological implications of our work – we found a relatedness effect for whole phrases and this shows that the probe recognition task can be used to test the representation of larger constituents. |