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Does narrow focus activate alternative referents?

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Braun,  Bettina
Language Comprehension Group, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Decoding Continuous Speech, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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Braun_Weber_Crocker_2005.pdf
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Citation

Braun, B., Weber, A., & Crocker, M. (2005). Does narrow focus activate alternative referents? In Proceedings of the 9th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology (pp. 1709-1712).


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0013-1714-A
Abstract
Narrow focus refers to accent placement that forces one interpretation of a sentence, which is then often perceived contrastively. Narrow focus is formalised in terms of alternative sets, i.e. contextually or situationally salient alternatives. In this paper, we investigate whether this model is valid also in human utterance processing. We present an eye-tracking experiment to study listeners’ expectations (i.e. eye-movements) with respect to upcoming referents. Some of the objects contrast in colour with objects that were previously referred to, others do not; the objects are referred to with either a narrow focus on the colour adjective or with broad focus on the noun. Results show that narrow focus on the adjective increases early fixations to contrastive referents. Narrow focus hence activates alternative referents in human utterance processing