Journal of Psycholinguistic Research

, Volume 43, Issue 6, pp 771–790 | Cite as

Effect on Comprehension of Preposed versus Postposed Adverbial Phrases

  • Saveria Colonna
  • Michel Charolles
  • Laure Sarda
  • Joël Pynte
Article
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Abstract

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this paper, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials such as In the park.... Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted to test the ‘Discourse Framing Hypothesis’ according to which preposed adverbials can be seen as frame builders announcing that incoming contents satisfy the same informational criterion specified by the adverbial. Our results indicate that spatial adverbials do not play the same role when they are in sentence-initial and in sentence-final position. These results are discussed in the framework of Zwaan’s Event Indexing Model.

Keywords

Text comprehension Adverbials Space 
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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  • Saveria Colonna
    • 1
  • Michel Charolles
    • 2
  • Laure Sarda
    • 3
  • Joël Pynte
    • 4
    • 5
  1. 1.UMR7023 Structures Formelles du Langage, University of Paris 8Paris Cedex 17France
  2. 2.UMR 8094 LATTICE CNRS-ENSUniversity of Paris 3MontrougeFrance
  3. 3.CNRS, UMR 8094 LATTICE CNRS-ENS & Université Paris 3MontrougeFrance
  4. 4.CNRS, Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neuropsychologie Cognitives et Université Paris DescartesParisFrance
  5. 5.Institut de PsychologieBoulogne-Billancourt CedexFrance

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