After reading, "few of the juniors were accepted," focus is on the students not accepted, the complement set. According to the Presupposition Denial Account, negative quantifiers, such as "few," convey a denial of expectation, or shortfall, which leads to complement set focus. In six experiments, we explored the role of the…

This study aims to establish whether the processing of different connectives (e.g., "and," "but") and different coherence relations (addition, contrast) can be modulated by a structural feature of the connected segments--namely, parallelism. While "but" is mainly used to contrast two expressions, "and"…

In 5 experiments, participants read passages with sentences containing a categorical anaphoric reference. The exemplar referred to was either present in the passage, present but negated, or absent from the passage. Reading times were at least as fast when the exemplar was absent as when it was present, and reading times were slowest when the…