Sedivy (2002) proposed that using "only" and prior referential context to specify contrastive focus can guide the parsing of relative clause ambiguities. We report two studies investigating this hypothesis, using sentences that either temporarily allowed or disallowed a transitive main clause interpretation. Sentence completions demonstrated that…

The text-change detection task has been used to show that changes are more readily detected for words that fall under narrow focus than broad focus (Sturt, Sanford, Stewart, & Dawydiak, 2004), and that narrow focus appears to lead to finer semantic distinctions being held in the representation of the word. The present experiments apply the same…