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• We attempted to replicate a foundational study by Cutler and Fodor (1979). • Cutler and Fodor found shorter reaction times to words focused by preceding questions. • They argued that both discourse and prosody guide attention to new information. • We successfully replicated their findings using updated statistical analyses. We report the results of a replication attempt of a foundational study by Cutler and Fodor (1979). This study sparked several lines of research into the role of information structure in language comprehension, based on the proposal that discourse characteristics, prosodic focus, and syntactic focusing constructions may all guide the comprehender's attention to new important information. Using a phoneme monitoring task, Cutler and Fodor reported that word-initial phonemes in acoustically identical sentences were identified faster when the word had been focused, as opposed to de-focused, by a preceding question. This influential finding has not been replicated using current experimental and statistical standards. Additionally, later research on this topic has deviated considerably from Cutler and Fodor's original proposal and has led to contradictory results. We attempted to replicate the original study following current standards for performing statistical analyses and assessed whether the results of these analyses differ from those obtained from analyses more similar to those conducted originally. We found that in our data, the critical interaction between focus and target position reported by Cutler and Fodor replicates using both the original and the updated analyses, while the two (less important) main effects of focus and target position were only replicated using the updated analyses. This replication provides a stronger foundation to these diverging lines of research, and it is likely to spark new investigations into information structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights: [•] Font emphasis in a discourse influences subsequent recognition memory. [•] Helps reject important discourse alternatives but not unmentioned items. [•] Results suggest emphasis leads readers to encode specific important alternatives. [•] Effects from contrastive prosody generalize to emphasis in written text. [•] Discourse plausibility constrains the set of alternatives encoded. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: We investigated the role of discourse context in relative clause processing. We first replicated finding that pronominal object relative clauses are easier to process than analogous subject relative clauses (an effect which stands in contrast to previous research on pronominal relative clauses). We then analyzed corpus data to demonstrate that the embedded noun phrase in object relative clauses nearly always has a discourse-old referent, even if the noun phrase is not pronominal, while the referent of the embedded noun phrase in subject relative clauses is typically discourse-new. We then extended the work of , by demonstrating in region-by-region reading that full noun phrase object relative clauses are not more difficult to process than subject relatives when they are preceded by appropriate discourse contexts. Finally, we reanalyzed data from the Dundee Eye-tracking corpus to show that contra , naturally occurring object relatives are no harder to process than subject relatives. We conclude that the processing difficulties associated with object as compared to subject relative clauses arises because object relative clauses violate more discourse expectations in typical experimental contexts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• Discourse information constrains recipients' interpretations of gestures. • Synchronisation of gesture and semantic affiliate is not essential for integration. • Integration processes of asynchronous gestures are reflected in the P600. • Recipients dynamically update how a gesture is integrated into a discourse model. Previous studies have suggested that a co-speech gesture needs to be synchronous with semantically related speech (semantic affiliates) for its successful semantic integration into a discourse model because co-speech gestures are often highly ambiguous on their own. But not all gestures synchronise with semantic affiliates, some precede them. The current study tested whether the interpretation of a gesture that does not synchronise with its semantic affiliate can be constrained by preceding verbal discourse and integrated into a recipient's discourse model. A behavioural experiment (Experiment 1) showed that related discourse information can indeed constrain recipients' interpretations of such gestures. Results from an ERP experiment (Experiment 2) confirmed that synchronisation between gesture and semantic affiliate is not essential in order for the gesture to become part of a discourse model, but only if the preceding context constrains the gesture's meaning. In this case, we found evidence for post-semantic integration (P600, time-locked to the gesture's semantic affiliate). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]