University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The Effects of Focus During Sentence Comprehension

Birch, Stacy Lynette

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Description

Title
The Effects of Focus During Sentence Comprehension
Author(s)
Birch, Stacy Lynette
Issue Date
1993
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Garnsey, Susan,
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
  • Language, Linguistics
  • Psychology, Experimental
Abstract
In a series of experiments I investigated the effects of linguistic focus on people's memory for words in sentences. I tested whether using phrases like "It was the ... " and "There was this ... " to focus on a particular word, enhances memory for particular types of information about the word, including its identity and its phonological and semantic characteristics. In each of four experiments, subjects read sentences that varied according to whether or not they placed a single, critical word (the prime) in focus. Each sentence was followed, either immediately, or after a delay, by a target word that subjects responded to in a speeded recognition task (Experiments 1 and 4), a naming task (Experiment 3), or both (Experiment 2). The results indicated that the identity of a word was consistently better remembered when it had been focused (Experiments 1-4). Also, phonological information about the words was found to be better remembered for focused words in the naming task (Experiment 3) and in the delayed recognition task (Experiment 4), but not in the immediate recognition task (Experiment 1). Memory for semantic information about words was not affected by focus. The results suggest that placing a word in focus enhances memory not for semantic information, which is ordinarily well-remembered anyway, but for word-identity and phonological information, i.e., two types of information that ordinarily are not well-remembered.
Graduation Semester
1993
Type of Resource
text
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/72123

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