Context and Position – A Reaction-Time Study

Manuel Dangl
IDSL I, Universität zu Köln

In our experiment we examine the contribution of syntax and context to in-formation structure, specifically the influence of context on the processing of referential expressions occurring in the German pre- and middlefield.
Previous studies have already shown that given information is processed more easily than new information, with indirectly given, inferred infor-mation ranking somewhere in between (cf. e.g. Burkhardt, 2006; Haviland & Clark, 1974; Schumacher & Hung, 2012). When it comes to the impact of contextual information on specific sentential positions, namely the pre- and middlefield positions, the findings are less clear: Some studies suggest that referents in the prefield must be contextually licensed, resulting in an ad-vantage for contextually given information in this position (Hankammer, 1971; Ward, 1988; Weskott, Hörnig, Fanselow, & Kliegl, 2011 for specific inference types), others report that the influence of context for referents in the prefield position is only minimal for information packaging (Schumacher & Hung, 2012).
The goal of the present reaction time study was to shed some more light on-to this issue. For this purpose we compared referential expressions in the pre- and middlefield position of canonical and non-canonical sentences paired with three different kinds of context, namely i) given information in the form of repeated NPs, ii) inferred NPs, and iii) new NPs. Following each context-target sentence pair, participants were asked to perform an agent identification task. The reaction times revealed an interaction of context by syntactic position, which appears to be more pronounced in the prefield po-sition. The data thus suggest that the prefield position in German is indeed licensed contextually with co-reference contributing the most to facilitate processing in this position.