Processing Focus in Turkish

Abstract

The immediately preverbal position has been argued to be the default focus position in Turkish. In absence of any overt focus markers, the constituent in this position is considered to carry sentential stress and neutral information for canonical word-order sentences and focus is projected to the whole sentence in the form of broad focus. In non-canonical word-order sentences, the immediately preverbal constituent is presumed to carry focal stress and the focused constituent would receive narrow focus. This paper tested this claim experimentally. The paper also investigated if there were any differences in the cognitive operations associated with processing and revising focus in canonical and non-canonical sentences. There were a sentence completion task and an eye-tracking experiment. The sentence completion data and the eye-tracking data supported the theoretical predictions: the immediately preverbal position was associated with default focus in Turkish when no pitch accentuation or other focus markers were available. The eye-tracking data further showed that changes to word-order were perceived as cues for broad versus narrow focus marking. The participants’ processing of and revision from narrow focus were costlier than processing broad focus and assigning narrow focus for the first time. We argue, in line with previous research, that this may be due to deeper encoding of focused information in memory or heavier memory load resulting from keeping a set of alternatives of the focused constituent when it has contrastive meaning.