The effect of linguistic focus manipulation on truth judgements /

Research in psycholinguistics has been investigated the role of linguistic focus in discourse integration as well as syntactic processing. While these are interesting to study on their own, in order to keep up with a rapid progress in the artificial intelligence field, which Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a big part of, it calls for more pragmatic approach in humanities. This thesis aimed at exploring a possible connection between linguistic focus manipulation and subsequent truth judgements, taking into account processing fluency, which is known to be a prominent inference of truth judgements. To test this, an online survey was conducted, where 68 participants rated the perceived truth value of presented true and false statements, where some of them were assumed to be general knowledge statements with an objective truth value as false, whereas others were assumed to be unknown true and false statements. Each sentence was seen by a participant in one of its’ three conditions – focused, where the critical to the judgement information bit was syntactically empathized, defocused, where other part of the sentence was in focus, or neutral, where linguistic focus is assumed to fall on the sentence’s predicate. Focusing was achieved by utilizing it-cleft and pseudo-cleft constructions. The later data analysis revealed that the average truth judgements differed significantly between the two assumed knowledge levels, however the difference in judgements between conditions across the knowledge levels was not significant, although a slight increase in truth judgement response values was seen for the assumed to be known false statements in the manipulated defocused condition. This pattern might have failed to reach significance due to the small effect size and therefore a low power of the study, as well as to have resulted as a flaw of the study design, as different sentences in same conditions were not pre-tested, thus cannot be equated. There is also a possibility that linguistic focus manipulation simply does not exert an effect on truth judgements, but more research is needed to be able to state that conclusively.

Grantor dc:publisher

Institutional Repository of Vilnius University

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Kasparavičiūtė, Ieva,

• kalbinis dėmesio objektas, tiesos vertinimai, informacijos apdorojimo sklandumas, semantinis susietumas, sintaksinis apdorojimas, linguistic focus, truth judgements, processing fluency, semantic relatedness, syntactic processing

Statement dc:rights

• info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Language dc:language

eng

Repository record dc:identifier

https://repository.vu.lt/VU:ELABAETD210586130&prefLang=en_US

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vu.lt:elaba:210586130