中国科学院行为科学重点实验室知识库

Focus is the most emphasised constituent of a sentence and either marks information that is newly asserted or indicates a contrast between current information and its alternatives. To investigate how readers process information focus (IF) and corrective focus (CF) at different positions in sentences, participants were visually presented with dialogues through a sentence comprehension task. The results showed that focus elicited a larger P2 and late positive component (LPC) than background, possibly reflecting a process of attention allocation and immediate discourse updating. Additionally, IF elicited a larger P2 than CF at the clause-medial position, while CF elicited a larger LPC than IF at the clause-final position, indicating that readers use various strategies to process the two kinds of focus at the different positions. The present study suggests that focus processing is influenced by both context and focus position.