No abstract

The study investigates contextual effects on the processing of pre-verbal (preVf) and postverbal (postVf) focus sentences in an eye-tracking experiment. For comparison, lexically marked focus (only-f) sentences were also included. The test sentences were presented following two types of linguistic context: restrictive or non-restrictive. It was hypothesized that if preVf exhaustivity is purely structurally encoded, gaze will converge on the exhaustive target image at a similar rate in the two contexts, just as it does in the case of only-f. However, if context also has an effect on the emergence of exhaustivity in preVf, gaze should converge more slowly on the exhaustive target in the non-restrictive context than in the restrictive context as predicted in postVf. The results support the latter prediction: fixation patterns diverge in the case of both preVf and postVf sentences, while they do not in the case of the baseline only-f.

The present work investigates the memory accessibility of linguistically focused elements and the representation of the alternatives for these elements (i.e., their possible replacements) in Working Memory (WM) and in delayed recognition memory in the case of the Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction (preVf). In two probe recognition experiments we presented preVf and corresponding focusless neutral sentences embedded in five-sentence stories. Stories were followed by the presentation of sentence probes in one of three conditions: (i) the probe was identical to the original sentence in the story, (ii) the focused word (i.e., target) was replaced by a semantically related word and (iii) the target word was replaced by a semantically unrelated but contextually suitable word. In Experiment 1, probes were presented immediately after the stories measuring WM performance, while in Experiment 2, blocks of six stories were presented and sentences were probed with a 2-minute delay measuring delayed recognition memory performance. Results revealed an advantage of the focused element in immediate but not in delayed retrieval. We found no effect of sentence type on the recognition of the two different probe types in WM performance. However, results pertaining to the memory accessibility of focus alternatives in delayed retrieval showed an interference effect resulting in a lower memory performance. We conclude that this effect is indirect evidence for the enhanced activation of focus alternatives. The present work is novel in two respects. First, no study has been conducted on the memory representation of focused elements and their alternatives in the case of the structurally marked Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction. Second, to our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the focus representation accounts for WM and delayed recognition memory using the same stimuli and same measured variables. Since both experiments used exactly the same stimulus set, and they only differed in terms of the timing of recognition probes, the principle of ceteris paribus fully applied with respect to how we addressed our research question regarding the two different memory systems.

The study uses a novel experimental method to investigate contextual factors claimed in the theoretical literature to license the use of Hungarian pre-verbal focus. These factors are: (i) identification, (ii) contrast, (iii) availability of a set on which the focus operates and (iv) whether this set is explicit or implicit. We tested the effects of these factors using online surveys in which respondents read short texts describing a context and saw a cloud of randomly arranged words. The experimental task was to create sentences that naturally fit the context by clicking the words in the cloud. Results show that narrow identification and contrast reliably predict the use of pre-verbal focus as does the availability of a set regardless of explicitness.