Effects of syntactic prominence on eye movements during reading

Abstract

Three experiments explored whether patterns of eye movements during reading might help explain syntactic prominence effects that are typically observed using reaction time tasks. Participants read sentences in which target words were in syntactically prominent or syntactically less prominent positions. Across all three experiments, using three types of syntactic prominence manipulations, there were fewer fixations and shorter reading times for words in more prominent positions, indicating that enhanced accessibility of syntactically prominent words is not caused by increased processing time. Rather, syntactic prominence appears to facilitate early encoding/lexical access and sentence integration processes while also, as shown previously, increasing activation of concepts in a comprehender's sentence or discourse representation. We propose that enhanced encoding and sentence integration processes can be attributed to an increase in attentional resources for more prominent concepts, and that this increase derives from readers' immediate sensitivity to informational prominence contours that are signaled by syntax.