Early association of prosodic focus with alleen ‘only’: evidence from eye movements in the visual-world paradigm

Abstract

In three visual-world eye tracking studies, we investigated the processing of sentences containing different prosodic focus, such as the Dutch Ik heb alleen SELDERIJ aan de brandweerman gegeven ‘I only gave CELERY to the fireman.’ versus Ik heb alleen selderij aan de BRANDWEERMAN gegeven. ‘I only gave celery to the FIREMAN.’. Dutch focal stress is like English focal stress. Unlike previous studies (Gennari, Meroni, & Crain, 2005; Paterson et al., 2007), we report eye gaze patterns as they unfold during the utterance with early or late stress. We conclude that focus processing is fast and incremental: eye-gaze patterns start to diverge across the two conditions already as the indirect object is being heard. Our data also indicate that participants anticipate the continuation of the utterance (Altmann & Kamide, 1999; Kamide, Altmann, & Heywood, 2005; Ito & Speer, 2008) , providing further evidence for early focus processing, and that focus evaluation is proposition-based.