Processing corrective focus and information focus at different positions: an electrophysiological investigation

ABSTRACT

Focus is the most emphasised constituent of a sentence and either marks information that is newly asserted or indicates a contrast between current information and its alternatives. To investigate how readers process information focus (IF) and corrective focus (CF) at different positions in sentences, participants were visually presented with dialogues through a sentence comprehension task. The results showed that focus elicited a larger P2 and late positive component (LPC) than background, possibly reflecting a process of attention allocation and immediate discourse updating. Additionally, IF elicited a larger P2 than CF at the clause-medial position, while CF elicited a larger LPC than IF at the clause-final position, indicating that readers use various strategies to process the two kinds of focus at the different positions. The present study suggests that focus processing is influenced by both context and focus position.

KEYWORDS:

• Information focus
• corrective focus
• Event-related potentials (ERPs)
• position

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The researchers named this kind of focus differently, in which Gussenhoven (2007) used corrective focus, while other researchers used contrastive focus (e.g., Gundel, 1999; Krifka, 2008; Lee, 2003; Selkirk, 2008). In the present study, we led the readers to correct an alternative item in the yes/no question, thus we preferred to use “corrective focus (CF)” throughout the whole paper.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported through the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant numbers 31000505, 31471075], the MOE (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China) Project of Humanitiesand Social Sciences [Project number 17YJC190013], and Natural Science Foundation of Liaoning Province [grant number 20180550313].