Discourse representations guide alternative set activation

Linguistic focus triggers the activation of contrastive alternatives to the expression in focus (Braun & Tagliapietra, 2010). Priming studies, which did not manipulate the discourse context of sentences containing foci, have suggested a two-stage model of how alternatives are considered in real-time comprehension: First, semantic associates are activated as in normal word recognition, and then, alternatives that contrast appropriately with a focus are selected from among them (Husband & Ferreira, 2015). Reading, memory, and visual world studies, however, have shown that comprehenders also utilize discourse information and world knowledge to identify alternatives (Fraundorf et al., 2013; Kim et al., 2015; Sedivy, 2002). This article considers two extensions of Husband and Ferreira's (2015) model that take discourse information into account: one in which discourse information is only used at a late stage to select appropriate alternatives after semantic associates are primed and one in which discourse information may itself be used to activate alternatives during earlier processing stages. Under the first, purely selection-based model, any effect of the discourse (in)appropriateness of alternatives should not be contemporaneous with effects of semantic association, because discourse information should be used only in the selection process, after an initial candidate set has been activated. Three incremental comprehension studies using the Maze task do not support these predictions. The results indicated contemporaneous effects of discourse information and semantic association on comprehension of potential alternatives, pointing instead to a model with effects of discourse at an early stage of activation. Comprehenders access discourse information to differentiate among potential alternatives, whose activation does not depend exclusively on semantic associate priming. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).