Discourse context and the processing of contrastive focus in silent reading (SPSS data files)

Abstract

Words such as “only” and “even” indicate that a contrast is to be made between information that is given in a sentence and some alternatives. For example, a sentence such as “Only Mary kissed John” means that Mary kissed John but no-one else did. However, sentences that contain these words often have more than one possible meaning, depending on which part of the sentence is used to form the contrast. We conducted three experiments in which we analysed eye movements during reading to investigate skilled readers’ understanding of sentences containing “only”. The results demonstrated that skilled readers make rapid use of grammatical and contextual knowledge to select the appropriate meaning of a sentence, but that grammatical knowledge has the more important role. Although these findings are directly informative about skilled reading, they may also provide insights into problems that might be encountered by beginning readers or people with reading difficulty.