Linguistic Focus Promotes the Ease of Discourse Integration Processes in Reading Comprehension: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials.

ABSTRACT: Psycholinguistic studies of focus processing have yielded varying results regarding how focus affects language processing. We report the results of an event-related potential (ERP) experiment that used question-answer pairs in a discourse to manipulate whether a target word was contextually focused, contrastively focused, contextually defocused, or contextually neutral. We found a negative-going waveform that was sustained in the time-course (250-800 ms after the target word onset) with a maximum over frontal-central scalp sites. As the structure of the discourse made the target word more focused, the negative-going deflection was systematically reduced. We also observed a frontal positive-going waveform that was larger for the focus-marked words relative to the neutral target word in an e

SUBMITTER: Yang CL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6367260 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature