Register affects language comprehension: ERP evidence from article omission in newspaper headlines

Genre Determining Prediction: Non-Standard TAM Marking in Football Language

“…However, we do not analyze prediction locally, that is, in a sentence-based way, but globally in the sense of the classification of a whole discourse in terms of the subject it covers. We find a similar principle in the study by Schumacher and Avrutin (2011), who analyze the role of a certain discourse type for the processing of articleless noun phrases. The discourse type that they are interested in, a classification for which they use the category term "register" (see Schumacher and Avrutin, 2011, p. 306, footnote 3, for the way they determine it), is that of newspaper headlines.…”

Positional influences on information packaging: Insights from topological fields in German

“…), and topicality -as another marker of discourse salience (Arnold, 2010;Cowles et al, 2007;Kaiser, 2006) -also serves as a cue in the computation of salience (electrophysiological evidence for this already comes from referential processing in Chinese; Hung & Schumacher, 2012). It can further be assumed that Discourse Linking is guided by both bottom-up and top-down processes (for top-down effects associated with the N400 see e.g., Lotze, Tune, Schlesewsky, & Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, 2011;Schumacher & Avrutin, 2011). This is a property of the SDM that other multi-phase discourse models do not share which typically assume that the initial process is purely bottom-up (like 'construction' in van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983 or 'bonding' in Garrod & Terras, 2000).…”

Sentence-Level Effects of Literary Genre: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence

“…Genre awareness influences how we articulate a text (e.g., Byers, 1979 ; Barney, 1999 ), or how quickly we read it and what we recognize or recall of its surface structure and content ( Zwaan, 1991 , 1994 ; Hanauer, 1998b ; Fischer et al, 2003 ; Tillmann and Dowling, 2007 ). The strongest evidence for genre-specific reading comes from studies that reported effects of genre attribution on the processing of identical texts (e.g., Zwaan, 1991 , 1994 ; Schumacher and Avrutin, 2011 ).…”

“…As previous studies on genre-specific reading have typically used global measures such as reading rate ( Zwaan, 1991 , 1994 ; Hanauer, 1998b ), or investigated sentence-level categories such as newspaper headlines ( Schumacher and Avrutin, 2011 ), it is still uncertain whether effects of literary genres are already detectable in the online processing of single sentences. Therefore, a main objective of the present study was to provide empirical evidence for genre-specific reading at the sentence level.…”

“…Note that while we are testing for genre-dependent adaptations that are aprioristic , we neither imply that adaptations necessarily precede processing (although categorization usually does), nor do we claim that they are exclusively genre-dependent. Rather, we assume that the schematic text type representations that experienced readers have acquired are associated with specific processing defaults ( Zwaan, 1991 , 1994 ; Hanauer, 1998b ; Fischer et al, 2003 ; Schumacher and Avrutin, 2011 ), and that the textual variables of actual discourse may override these defaults (for semantic processing, see Nieuwland and Van Berkum, 2006 ). If this assumption is correct, and if we are correct in assuming that attention to sound recurrences and expectation of unusual semantic combinations are part of the poetic reading mode ( Beaugrande, 1978 ; Thorne, 1988 ; Gibbs et al, 1991 ), then we should observe genre-dependent differences in the offline evaluation (Experiment 1) and online processing (Experiment 2) of verbal stimuli already at the level of the single sentence.…”