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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]

This study examines the use of tag questions in Italian conversation. We propose a classification of their discourse functions, and provide an account of their syntactic and discourse contexts. The data used are recordings of conversation in several settings: experimental game settings, a reality TV show, and TV and radio talk shows, for a total of 60.4 h. The analysis uncovered seven main functions, some of which do not conform to existing classifications in the literature. We explore the relationship between these functions and the conversational settings in which they are used, their placement within the utterance, and their relationship with asymmetries in participants’ leadership roles in specific settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes a discursive constructionist (DC) approach to narrative in second/foreign language teaching and learning research. We begin by sketching an historical and theoretical background of constructionism. Next, we describe how DC advances contemporary narrative research by prioritizing analysis of narrative construction , that is, the in situ mobilization of the constructed and constructive elements of discourse that story-tellers use to build narrative worlds. Drawing on an analysis of two narrative episodes from focus group research with ESL teachers, we examine the construction and versioning of narrative worlds, identities, and knowledge. We also consider an additional affordance that attends a DC approach to narrative research—methodography—which opens up for analysis the situated work of the researcher/data analyst. We conclude with suggestions for future applications of DC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]