Francesca Carota, Ambra Ferrari, Natalia Levshina, Rinus Verdonschot, Hatice Zora
Information Structure refers to how information is packaged in a linguistic utterance.
Relevant and related concepts are Topic-Comment, Given-New, Focus-NonFocus. There does not seem to be a linguistic universal for marking Information Structure. Some languages mark it prosodically, other languages do it through syntax or morphology. In earlier ERP studies we have found that semantic (N400) and syntactic (P600) ERP effects are modulated by Information Structure status (i.e. different ERP effect sizes in the focus and non-focus constituents). Our hypothesis is that underlying Information Structure there is a universal processing mechanism. That is, syntactic, prosodic and other markers of Information Structure are built-in linguistic devices that trigger the contribution of the attentional networks in the brain, in the service of in-depth processing of the focus constituent. This hypothesis is further tested in languages with very different linguistic markers of Information Structure (e.g., Makhuwa, Swedish, Turkish, Italian) and through investigating the role of beat gestures in marking focus.
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