Speaker: Amanda Rysling (UC Santa Cruz)
Title: What it takes to comprehend (a) focus
Time: Friday, April 5th, 3:30pm – 5pm
Location: 32-141
Abstract: Over the past half-century, psycholinguistic studies of linguistic focus have found that comprehenders preferentially attend to focused material and process it more “deeply” or “effortfully” than non-focused material. But psycholinguists have investigated only a limited subset of focus constructions, and we have not come to an understanding of how costly focus is to process, what factors govern that cost, or why the language comprehension system behaves in the way that it does, and not others. In this talk, I discuss the problem for language comprehenders presented by the category of focus, and present evidence that focus processing is generally costly, but this cost can be attenuated by the presence of contrastive alternatives to a focus in the context before that upcoming focus. Evidence from the processing of second-occurrence foci demonstrates that comprehenders seem to work harder than our general models of sentence processing would posit that they should in comprehending given focused material. These findings add to our understanding of what it means to be good enough or efficient in language processing, delineating conditions under which comprehenders do (not) find apparently important material to be worth processing deeply or effortfully.