On the processing of pragmatic information: ERP effects of emphasis processing

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the pragmatic processing of emphasis using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. Participant reads one-character and two-character mini-discourses, wherein the target name is either emphasised or not. Firstly, results show that the emphasised name elicited a larger P2 than the non-emphasised name, which suggests that emphasis modulates the attention of readers. Secondly, the emphasised name elicited a larger P300 than the non-emphasised name, which suggests that emphasis enhances online discourse integration. The emphasised condition on the sentence-final word elicited a smaller P300 than the non-emphasised condition in the two-character discourse, but not in the one-character discourse. This result suggests that the integration of emphasis information is facilitated by a contrastive character. Thus, the effect of emphasis may occur after the onset of the target word and end late with the integration of discourse information on the sentence-final words, which suggests that pragmatic processing is flexible.

KEYWORDS:

• Pragmatic information
• emphasis
• focus
• ERP
• discourse comprehension

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Dr Olaf Hauk and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the manuscript, and Dr Xuhai Chen for his help in the data analysis. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant number 31500916, the National Education Sciences Planning of China under Grant number EBA140359 and the Plan of Distinguished Young Scholars of Fujian Province.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under grant number 31500916, the National Education Sciences Planning of China under grant number EBA140359 and the Plan of Distinguished Young Scholars of Fujian Province.