Pragmatic Influences on Sentence Integration: Evidence from Eye Movements

To understand a discourse, readers must rapidly process semantic and syntactic information and extract the pragmatic information these sources imply. An important question concerns how this pragmatic information influences discourse processing in return. We address this issue in two eye movement experiments that investigate the influence of pragmatic inferences on the processing of inter-sentence integration. In Experiments 1a and 1b, participants read two-sentence discourses in Chinese in which the first sentence introduced an event and the second described its consequence, where the sentences were linked using either the causal connective “suoyi” (meaning “so” or “therefore”) or not. The second sentence included a target word that was unmarked or marked using the focus particle “zhiyou” (meaning “only”) in Experiment 1a or “shi” (equivalent to an it-cleft) in Experiment 1b. These particles have the pragmatic function of implying a contrast between a target element and its alternatives. The results showed that while the causal connective facilitated the processing of unmarked words in causal contexts (a connective facilitation effect), this effect was eliminated by the presence of the focus particle. This implies that contrastive information is inferred sufficiently rapidly during reading that it can influence semantic processes involved in sentence integration. Experiment 2 showed that disruption due to conflict between the processing requirements of focus and intersentence integration occurred only in causal and not adversative connective contexts, confirming that processing difficulty occurred when a contrastive relationship was not possible.