Constructing focus alternatives from context and the limits of semantic priming
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3765/elm.3.5812Keywords:
Focus, Alternatives, sentence processing, Probe recognitionAbstract
Interpreting focus requires a comprehender to identify the set of alternatives intended by the speaker. Previous psycholinguistic research has characterized this process in terms of a two-stage model that initially forms an alternative set via the context-insensitive mechanism of semantic priming (Gotzner et al. 2016, Husband & Ferreira 2016). We have instead advanced a one-stage immediate-access model, in which alternatives are immediately constructed from the discourse context (Muxica & Harris to appear). In two cross-modal probe recognition task experiments, we further test our prediction that the discourse context strongly influences response speed at early moments of focus interpretation. The results are interpreted as uniquely supporting the immediate-access model.
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Copyright (c) 2025 Christian Muxica, Jesse Harris

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Published by the LSA with permission of the author(s) under a CC BY 4.0 license.