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Facilitating Automation in Sentence Processing: The Emergence of Topic and Presupposition in Human Communication

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Abstract

Human attention is limited in its capacity and duration. In language, this is manifested in many ways, but more conspicuously in the strategies by which information is distributed in utterances, that is, their information structures. We contend that the pragmatic categories of Topic and Presupposition precisely meet the necessity to modulate attentional resources on sentence contents, and they do this by “directing” certain contents to automatic and others to controlled processing mechanisms. We discuss experimental findings suggesting that presupposed or topicalized information correlates with automatic processing, and we suggest that this association grounded for the emergence of topic and presupposition units in human communication. We also put forth the processing automaticity induced by these units as the (possible) rationale behind their persuasiveness in some specific contexts of language use (e.g. political discourse and advertising).

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Notes

  1. In the rest of the present work, we will sometimes refer to the STM store as Working Memory (WM), although this latter identifies a particularly dynamic component of the Short-Term Memory store.

  2. It must be acknowledged that the distinction between automatic and controlled processes is one of the most contentious ones in the current literature. Indeed, previous experimental research (Hahne and Friederici 1999) on this double-modality processing has revealed that precise electrophysiological components seem to correlate to both modalities with qualitatively different kinds of effort required of the processor (cf. Sect. 5 on this issue). However, for the purpose of our discussion we will comply with Shiffrin & Schneider’s definition quoted above.

  3. Other test sentences always revolved around world knowledge contents (see Erickson and Mattson 1981, for other examples.

  4. “Garden path” effects are usually observed in syntax, when the first part of an utterance suggests a certain interpretation (e.g. The horse raced past the hedge…), which eventually proves wrong when the rest of the utterance is processed (the horse raced past the hedge had no rider), causing the “going back” to a previous position to take a different path of interpretation. Still, nothing prevents similar reanalysis phenomena to arise also for the informational structure of utterances.

  5. In other models, implicit contents triggered by partial quantification are described as conversational implicatures.

  6. This is the beginning of a broadcasted interview (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlVO87Qdm-M).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università degli Studi Roma Tre (University of Roma Tre), Via Ostiense, 234/236, 00146, Rome, Italy

    Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri & Viviana Masia

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  1. Edoardo Lombardi Vallauri
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  2. Viviana Masia
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Correspondence to Viviana Masia.

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Vallauri, E.L., Masia, V. Facilitating Automation in Sentence Processing: The Emergence of Topic and Presupposition in Human Communication. Topoi 37, 343–354 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9417-9

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