Pia Järnefeldt, Uppsala Universitet

An eyetracking study with a novel Visual World paradigm that integrates pupillometry

Discourse particles (PDs) are used to convey speaker attitudes and pragmatic information that guide the listener’s interpretation of the speaker’s utterances. DPs anchor sentences in context by referring to information that is not necessarily explicitly stated, such as common ground, visual context, or previously stated facts. They do not add propositional value to sentences, but rather operate on existing content words in order to facilitate the interpretation of utterances (Loureda et al., 2022). They are, however, extremely polysemous and can have diametrically different meanings depending on context. They are highly frequent in everyday language and notoriously hard for L2 learners to acquire (Hogeweg et al., 2016). I will present data from my doctoral thesis, where I have investigated the Swedish discourse particles ju, nog, egentligen and faktiskt. In a series of novel experiments (online cloze test, surveys and eye-tracking experiments) I have elicited online and offline measures for the processing and interpretation of these particles. The studies consist of both L1 and L2 data (altogether approximately 250 participants), and in my talk I will explain the design of my eye-tracking studies (170 participants), which is adapted from the Visual World paradigm (Tanenhaus et al., 1995) and integrates pupillometry measures. The results shed new light on both how L1 speakers process and interpret the DPs in question, but also bring to light differences between L1 and L2 use that might have consequences for the communication between L1 and L2 speakers. Both L1 and L2 speakers show a large variability in the interpretation of egentligen, and increased processing costs are shown in both groups, although the patterns differ. Offline measures show that L2 speakers are unsure of, or avoid the use of ju.