Understanding Discoursal Causals in Persian: Evidence From Eye-Tracking

This article investigates how native Persian speakers process and comprehend affirmative and negative discoursal causal assertions. To examine this, an eye-tracking experiment was conducted with ۱۰ male and ۲۰ female Persian-speaking participants. The main experiment involved ۳۲ Persian vignettes, each containing three sentences: an opening sentence, a target sentence (affirmative or negative discoursal causal), and a concluding sentence. The polarity of the target and concluding sentences was varied (affirmative vs. negative) within participants. When participants heard an affirmative discoursal causal assertion (e.g., Because my skin was dry, I applied moisturizer), they primarily fixated on the factual phrase ("applying moisturizer"), with a fixation probability of ۶۳%, whereas the conjectural phrase received little attention, attracting only ۱۲% of fixation probability. A similar pattern was observed for negative assertions (e.g., Because my skin was not dry, I did not apply moisturizer), where participants focused on the factual phrase ("not applying moisturizer"), attracting only ۶۳% of fixations, largely ignoring the conjecture, with a fixation probability of only %۱۹. Fixation data confirmed that factual phrases consistently received more attention than conjectural ones during early processing stages. In the final analysis, the effect of specificity on fixation patterns was tested. Results showed that specificity did not significantly influence either early attention or increased attention to factual content across polarity conditions. Overall, the findings align with Mental Model Theory, emphasizing the cognitive priority given to factual representations

کلیدواژه ها:

discoursal causal ، visual world paradigm ، Mental Model Theory ، eye-tracking ، Persian language