Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Empirical Insights into Language and Cognition, Bilal Kırkıcı, Editör, Nobel Yayınevi, Ankara, ss.159-189, 2025
The present study reports on an eye-movement monitoring experiment investigating the focus (immediate vs. non-immediate preverbal) and argument (subject vs. object noun phrases (NPs)) position during silent reading. Turkish exhibits flexible word order where the inherent focus position is immediately pre-verbal. We examined whether processing differences occur when the focused constituent is positioned either at canonical neutral focus (immediate preverbal) or elsewhere in the preverbal area, and if so, whether these processing differences interact with the order of subject and object arguments (i.e. syntactic position). Our participants were asked to read sets of question-answer pairs, while their eye-movements were recorded, and to respond to an end-of-trial felicity judgement task. Our results showed that focused-elements were largely preferred in the immediate preverbal position. However, longer fixation durations were observed for those in the non-immediate preverbal position, and subject focus was consistently judged to be more acceptable than object focus in both immediate and non-immediate preverbal regions. Further, longer fixations and more regressions were observed for non-focused subjects than focused subjects. We suggest that there is a processing advantage for subject-scrambling to the immediate pre-verbal position in Turkish, which makes focus marking rather more salient during reading. This processing pattern is not applicable to object phrases. Our findings are compatible with theories which hold that focused-elements require greater processing demands, and that the given information is expected before the new during focus processing.