Behind the seemingly effortless use of language for conveying information lie extremely complex processes of encoding and extracting meaning. Sentences mark information as old, shared by speaker and listener, or as new, and thus in focus, through word order and prosody. Some of the real-time processes underlying the comprehension of words and sentence structure are fairly well understood by now, but processes involving the interaction between the structure, prosody and meaning of a sentence are just beginning to be studied. The researchers will obtain experimental evidence concerning the role of focus, marked through prosody and word order, in the interpretation of superlative expressions (e.g. 'the most expensive cake'). In English, prosodic focus expressed through the placement of accent (indicated by capitals) results in the different interpretation of sentences with identical word order: compare 'John gave MARY the most expensive cake' and 'JOHN gave Mary the most expensive cake'. In other languages, changes in word order have similar effect on the meaning of sentences with superlative expressions. The project aims to obtain evidence that focus, expressed through prosody or word order, guides processing during real-time comprehension of text. Understanding the role of focus in superlative expressions is important for linguistic theories of sentence structure, meaning, prosody and the interactions among them. Understanding the role of prosodic focus may have applications in natural language processing and speech technology. The findings will also have implications for other disciplines that study cognitive function such as psychology and neuroscience.
The researchers have previously identified cross-linguistic differences in the range of interpretations available to sentences with superlative expressions. They have explained these differences through the generalization that certain grammatical environments preclude focus-affected interpretation. The novel proposal that in a certain configuration the meaning contributed by the superlative is determined by focus can be tested experimentally. The researchers will investigate whether the hypothesized "focus association" effect, which results in a particular reading of a superlative sentence, is computed during real-time sentence processing in Polish. Polish, unlike English, shows both a wider range of interpretations in sentences with superlatives, and a syntactic way to manipulate the available interpretations, allowing manipulation of word order and silent prosody. (It has been shown that implicit accent placement is obligatory in silent reading.) The researchers will test whether the hypothesized focus association effect obtains in a parallel way to well-known cases of focus association involving the adverb 'only' (e.g. 'John only gave Mary a CAKE', 'John only gave MARY a cake'), in a self-paced reading experiment (Experiment 1) and in an ERP experiment (Experiment 2). The self-paced reading and ERP methodologies complement each other, and address the issue of the time-course of the cognitive operations that underlie native speakers' comprehension of sentences with superlatives.
