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Description
Non-canonical constructions and scrambled word order offer various ways to package information in the discourse. A key factor in this phenomenon is information status, precisely whether the information represented is given/old or new. This study investigated the online processing of English Existentials (e.g., There's a fly in my soup), constructions that are only felicitous when the information postposed to the postverbal slot in the utterance is new to the hearer. More specifically, the experiment presented here explored anticipatory processes linked to the comprehension of Existential sentences by trying to answer these questions: do hearers utilize their knowledge of Existentials' information structure constraints during language processing? Do hearers predict that new information will be mentioned as soon as they encounter the [there +be] construction? Thirty-three monolingual native speakers of English participated in an eye-tracking within the visual-world paradigm experiment. The goal of this experiment was to assess whether hearers shifted their attention to the entity that represented new information as soon as they heard the [there+be] construction, but before they had access to sufficient phonological input to process the noun phrase that represented said entity. The eye movement data collected indicates that the Existential construction had a significant main effect on the proportion of looks to the new entity during the critical time slice analyzed. Our findings suggest that under certain conditions (here, the Existential) new information becomes considerably more accessible to the hearer, to the point that they are able to generate predictions about upcoming linguistic structure. These findings also suggest that discourse-based information is very quickly incorporated during sentence processing, supporting interactive accounts of language comprehension.
