Abstract: Reading comprehension needs readers to construct a continuous representation of the information in discourse combined with their background knowledge. During this process, readers can make inferences of the protagonist’s emotions, and update their situation model when the emotions in discourse shift. Besides emotional shifted discourses, there are also discourses that consist of emotions in the same valence. Then, whether the emotional arousal of the discourse is raised by increased emotional cues, that is, this emotion is accumulated? And during the integration of emotion and structure of a discourse, how does topic structure influence the process of emotional accumulation is a question of interest. In addition, through the explicit and implicit tasks, the present study also investigates whether the influence of topic structure on emotional accumulation is modulated by experimental tasks. In our two experiments, two factors were manipulated: topic structure (topic-continuation, topic-shift) and the amount of emotional cues in discourse (one emotional cue, two emotional cues). Through the explicit task in experiment 1, participants were instructed to read 48 critical discourses and 72 fillers (each discourse consisted of two sentences) using a sentence-by-sentence self-paced reading procedure, and were asked to choose a number from 1-9 to make judgment of the discourse emotion (1 represented for the most negative, 9 represented for the most positive). Then the rating grade and the rating time were recorded. Also, the reading time of the second sentence was recorded. In experiment 2, through the implicit task, participants were instructed to answer a comprehension question after reading 1/3 of the materials (each discourse consisted of three sentences, in which the first two sentences were the same as experiment 2, and a third sentence which included an emotional word was added). So besides the reading time of the second sentence was recorded, the reading time of the emotional word in the third sentence and the word following it were recorded too. The results from Experiment 1 showed that for the explicit task where subjects were asked to make emotional judgment, topic structure did not significantly affect emotional accumulation, reflected by the higher grade and the shorter reading time of the discourses that included more emotional cues, both in the topic-continuation condition and the topic-shifted condition. However, for the implicit task where subjects were asked to read for comprehension in Experiment 2, topic structure significantly affected emotional accumulation in such way that discourses which included two emotional cues were read faster than discourses which included only one emotional cue in topic-continuation conditions, but not in topic-shifted conditions. This suggested that the process of emotional accumulation was disrupted in the topic-shifted condition. To conclude, through the explicit and implicit emotional processing tasks, the present study conducted two self-paced reading experiments to investigate how topic structure influenced emotional accumulation in discourse context. It was shown that under the implicit task, more emotional cues led to an accumulation in emotion and facilitated the processing of emotion for the topic-continuation conditions. But when the topic shifted, readers built representations of the current emotion under a new structure, and not based on former emotions in context. For further studies, these results provide evidence for a strong effect of discourse structure on emotional processing in discourse context. In addition, the influence of topic structure on emotional accumulation was modulated by the experimental tasks, which should be paid more attention in researches that related to emotional processing.

Key words: discourse, emotional accumulation, topic structure, explicit task, implicit task

摘要： 在阅读理解的过程中，读者能够自动对语篇中的情绪进行推断。本研究采用自定步速阅读的方法，分别在外显和内隐两种情绪加工的任务下，考察话题结构对语篇情绪累加的影响。结果发现，在实验一的外显情绪判断任务下，话题结构未显示出对语篇情绪累加的明显作用；在实验二的内隐情绪理解任务下，当话题延续时，读者对有两个情绪线索的语篇的阅读时间短于仅有一个情绪线索的语篇，此时情绪的累加促进了当前句的加工，而话题转换时，二者没有显著差异，说明此时读者在新结构下建立当前句的情绪表征，并不在先前情绪的基础上进行累加。

关键词: 语篇, 情绪累加, 话题结构, 外显任务, 内隐任务