Focus Alternatives in Production and Comprehension: Limited Effects of Contrastive Prosody

Contrastive focus highlights the information in the discourse that challenges the existingassumptions. Psycholinguistic evidence shows that contrastive focus is interpreted by activatingfocus alternatives. However, there is not much evidence on whether the activation of focusalternatives in the production and comprehension systems is similar or different. The current studyinvestigates how contrastive prosody and the resulting activation of focus-alternatives influencelexical access during word production and word recognition. In two experiments, we used cross-modal priming with prosodic focus (narrow vs. contrastive) and semantic relatedness (within-category focus alternatives vs. unrelated control items) as experimental factors. In Experiment 1, weassessed picture naming latencies, and in Experiment 2, we employed a lexical decision task. Weexpected a semantic interference (Experiment 1) or facilitation effect (Experiment 2) whenprocessing items from the same semantic category. Furthermore, we expected that these effectswould be modulated by contrastive prosodic focus. The observed interference (Experiment 1) andthe facilitation (Experiment 2) for focus alternatives confirmed earlier findings that same-categoryprime-target pairs lead to interference in production, and facilitation in comprehension. However,the absence of a modulation of these effects by prosodic focus suggested that the relationshipbetween contrastive prosody and the activation of focus alternatives may be weaker than previouslythought, and might depend on other factors.