Examining focus and alternative priming: effects of grammatical role and breadth of the alternative set

Recent work has shown that contrastive accenting plays a crucial role in discourse processing, causing listeners to activate alternatives to focused words and/or suppress non-contrastive semantic associates. However, key theoretical questions remain, relating to how lexical activation, sentence and discourse processing interact. These include the breadth of the alternative set, which could span from a small contextually-relevant set to a large, ‘permissive’ one; and whether these processes are best characterised as activation or suppression mechanisms. There is also little research on whether activation of alternatives differs by the grammatical role of the prime, despite differences in the focus-related properties of subjects versus objects. We present two cross-modal lexical decision experiments showing activation of non-contrastive associates is suppressed with contrastive focus, consistent with a suppression mechanism, at least for objects. Alternatives both semantically related, and unrelated, to the prime, were primed, consistent with a broad, ‘permissive’, alternative set. There were crucial differences in priming patterns for subjects versus objects. The study makes important contributions to our theoretical understanding of the role of focus in discourse processing.