Journal of Memory and Language

2720 0079 thor’ repo mou Brian Tane Mike colle Ad Sedi Box (401 that the presence of the focus operator only resulted in diminished garden path effects for reduced relative clauses, controlling for definiteness of the noun phrase. Experiment 2 manipulated discourse contexts and showed that the presence of an explicit contrast set in the context sentence preceding a target sentence with focus interacted with the continuation of an ambiguous fragment as either a main clause or reduced relative. Experiment 3 showed that discourse context effects did not play a role in reading times when the target sentence did not contain a focus marker, confirming that the focus effect is the result of the joint interaction of a focus marker and discourse context. The results of Experiment 4 suggested that the semantic requirements of focus combined with a constraining discourse lead to a garden path effect with main clause continuations of ambiguous strings as compared to unambiguous strings. These results provide evidence against a garden path model of sentence processing which initially computes only a single analysis. Possible mechanisms underlying the identification of contrast sets in discourse are discussed. © 2001 Elsevier Science (USA)