Information structure in Makhuwa: Electrophysiological evidence for a universal processing account

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Verdonschot, Rinus G.; van der Wal, Jenneke; Lewis, Ashley; Knudsen, Birgit; Wolfsthurn, Sarah von Grebmer zu; Schiller, Niels O.; Hagoort, Peter
• 署名单位: Max Planck Society; Leiden University; Leiden University - Excl LUMC; Radboud University Nijmegen; Leiden University; Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC); City University of Hong Kong
• 刊物名称: PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0027-13924
• DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2315438121
• 发表日期: 2024-07-23
• 关键词: focus; language

摘要

There is evidence from both behavior and brain activity that the way information is structured, through the use of focus, can up- regulate processing of focused constituents, likely to give prominence to the relevant aspects of the input. This is hypothesized to be universal, regardless of the different ways in which languages encode focus. In order to test this universalist hypothesis, we need to go beyond the more familiar linguistic strategies for marking focus, such as by means of intonation or specific syntactic structures (e.g., it- clefts). ern Mozambique, which uniquely marks focus through verbal conjugation. The participants were presented with sentences that consisted of either a semantically anomalous constituent or a semantically nonanomalous constituent. Moreover, focus on this particular constituent could be either present or absent. We observed a consistent pattern: Focused information generated a more negative N400 response than the same information in nonfocus position. This demonstrates that regardless of how focus is marked, its consequence seems to result in an upregulation of processing of information that is in focus.