The impact of focus particles on the recognition and rejection of contrastive alternatives
- The semantics of focus particles like only requires a set of alternatives (Rooth, 1992). In two experiments, we investigated the impact of such particles on the retrieval of alternatives that are mentioned in the prior context or unmentioned. The first experiment used a probe recognition task and showed that focus particles interfere with the recognition of mentioned alternatives and the rejection of unmentioned alternatives relative to a condition without a particle. A second lexical decision experiment demonstrated priming effects for mentioned and unmentioned alternatives (compared with an unrelated condition) while focus particles caused additional interference effects. Overall, our results indicate that focus particles trigger an active search for alternatives and lead to a competition between mentioned alternatives, unmentioned alternatives, and the focused element.
Author details: | Nicole Gotzner, Isabell WartenburgerORCiDGND, Katharina Spalek |
---|---|
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1017/langcog.2015.25 |
ISSN: | 1866-9808 |
ISSN: | 1866-9859 |
Title of parent work (English): | Language and cognition : an interdisciplinary journal of language and cognitive science |
Publisher: | Cambridge Univ. Press |
Place of publishing: | Cambridge |
Publication type: | Article |
Language: | English |
Year of first publication: | 2016 |
Publication year: | 2016 |
Release date: | 2020/03/22 |
Tag: | alternative-set semantics; competitive inhibition; focus particles; lexical decision task; probe recognition task |
Volume: | 8 |
Number of pages: | 37 |
First page: | 59 |
Last Page: | 95 |
Peer review: | Referiert |
Institution name at the time of the publication: | Humanwissenschaftliche Fakultät / Exzellenzbereich Kognitionswissenschaften |