Amanda Rysling of UC Santa Cruz will be presenting “Comprehenders spend both more and less effort on focus than we might expect” (abstract below) in our colloquium series Friday Nov. 10 at 3:30 in ILC room S211. We are looking forward to welcoming our accomplished alum (PhD 2017) back to campus!

ABSTRACT:  

Over the past half-century, psycholinguistic studies of linguistic focus — often described as the most important or informative part of a sentence — 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 in reading 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 demonstrate that comprehenders seem to work harder than they should have to in processing given focused material, while other evidence suggests that comprehenders aren’t working as hard as they might have done to find and prioritize upcoming foci. 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.