The Cognitive Neural Mechanisms Of Font Emphasis Influence Sentence Processing

In most books,We Chat official account articles,and online news,some information quickly caught our attention.This information is highlighted through special typography(bold,larger size,unique color,etc.)to achieve the effect of visual reinforcement.In the process of reading,we collectively refer to this special typography as font emphasis.Many previous studies have shown that font emphasis promotes multiple aspects of language comprehension,such as vocabulary recognition,information processing depth,memory representation,and reading comprehension.Researchers generally use the attention hypothesis to explain the mechanism behind this effect,arguing that font emphasis works by attracting attention.However,the attention hypothesis does not explain how font emphasis obtains more attention resources,nor does it adequately describe which language processing processes font emphasis influences during reading.Moreover,in addition to the visual features of bottom-up processing(font emphasis improves the visual contrast between vocabulary and background),font emphasis also has top-down processing pragmatic knowledge,that is,people learn fonts in long-term reading Emphasize implied importance.The role of the two in the font emphasis effect is still poorly understood.In response to the above problems,we designed two EEG experiments.Experiment 1 adopts a within-subject design of 2(Font emphasis: emphasis,control)× 2(Semantic congruency: congruent,incongruent)to explore how font emphasis modulates attention resources to promote semantic integration.The results showed that the critical words elicited a smaller N1 in the emphasized condition than in the control condition,indicating that font emphasis promotes word discrimination by improving the visual salience of the emphasized information,and reserves cognitive resources for subsequent language processing.In addition,in right hemisphere,the critical words elicited a lower alpha-beta,gamma energy in the emphasized condition than in the control condition,indicating that readers make more effort into emphatic information.Font emphasis promotes semantic integration.Experiment 2 mainly examines the influence of top-down processed pragmatic knowledge in font emphasis effect.For this purpose,we adopt a within-subject design of2(Font emphasis: emphasis,control)× 2(Focus: focus,non-focus)to explore the role of pragmatic knowledge in font emphasis effect.The results showed that there is an interaction between font emphasis and focus.For the non-focus conditions,the critical word induces lower alpha-beta energy in the emphasized condition than in the control condition,indicating that font emphasis is regulated by pragmatic knowledge.In two experiments,this thesis indicates that font emphasis promotes the word discrimination by improving the visual salience of words and reserves more cognitive resources for subsequent language comprehension.The extra cognitive resources facilitate semantic integration.Font emphasis is influenced not only by visual features,but also by pragmatic knowledge.