Effects of contrastive focus on lexical predictability during sentence reading: The case of not only. . .but also constructions

Abstract

Previous research suggests that language comprehenders are sensitive to the presence of focus-sensitive particles—words like only and not that are effective at marking the focus of the sentence. In addition to signalling linguistic focus, these words can also establish a semantic contrast between the focused element and an alternate set. For example, the phrase not only the bride places linguistic focus on the bride and may also prompt comprehenders to anticipate a set of upcoming entities that stand in semantic contrast to the bride. We tested this possibility in an eyetracking-while-reading experiment that systematically crossed structure (focus vs. noun-phrase coordination) with predictability of an upcoming target noun (predictable vs. unpredictable). Whereas first-pass reading time showed a robust predictability effect for the coordination condition, the effect was eliminated for the focus condition. Later eyetracking measures revealed main effects of both predictability and syntactic structure. Overall, the results suggest that language comprehenders rapidly make use of the cue not only and may use this cue to begin anticipating a set of upcoming sentence continuations during online sentence processing.