title: Emphasizing the only character: emphasis, attention and contrast.
abstract: In conversations, pragmatic information such as emphasis is important for identifying the speaker's/writer's intention. The present research examines the cognitive processes involved in emphasis processing. Participants read short discourses that introduced one or two character(s), with the character being emphasized or non-emphasized in subsequent texts. Eye movements showed that: (1) early processing of the emphasized word was facilitated, which may have been due to increased attention allocation, whereas (2) late integration of the emphasized character was inhibited when the discourse involved only this character. These results indicate that it is necessary to include other characters as contrastive characters to facilitate the integration of an emphasized character, and support the existence of a relationship between Emphasis and Contrast computation. Taken together, our findings indicate that both attention allocation and contrast computation are involved in emphasis processing, and support the incremental nature of sentence processing and the importance of contrast in discourse comprehension.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, China; Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Electronic address: chenlj@fjnu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Lijing
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. Electronic address: yangyf@psych.ac.cn.
authors.forename: Yufang
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yang
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D003142:Communication; D032882:Comprehension / Q000502:physiology*; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Attention allocation; Contrast; Emphasis; Eye movement; Focus; “Shi”