abstractBoye and Harder (2012) claim that the grammatical–lexical distinction has to do with discourse prominence: lexical elements can convey discursively primary (or foreground) information, whereas grammatical elements cannot (outside corrective contexts). This paper reports two experiments that test this claim. Experiment 1 was a letter detection study, in which readers were instructed to mark specific letters in the text. Experiment 2 was a text-change study, in which participants were asked to register omitted words. Experiment 2 showed a main effect of word category: readers attend more to words in lexical elements (e.g., full verbs) than to those in grammatical elements (e.g., auxiliaries). Experiment 1 showed an interaction: attention to letters in focused constituents increased more for grammatical words than for lexical words. The results suggest that the lexical–grammatical contrast does indeed guide readers’ attention to words.

中文翻译：

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语法是句子处理的背景

摘要Boye 和 Harder (2012) 声称语法-词汇的区别与话语突出性有关：词汇元素可以传达话语的主要（或前景）信息，而语法元素则不能（在纠正语境之外）。本文报告了两个测试这一主张的实验。实验 1 是一项字母检测研究，其中指示读者标记文本中的特定字母。实验 2 是一项文本更改研究，要求参与者记录省略的单词。实验2显示了词类的主要影响：读者更多地关注词汇元素（例如，完整动词）中的词而不是语法元素（例如，助动词）中的词。实验 1 显示了一种交互作用：语法词比词汇词对焦点成分中字母的关注增加更多。