Pragmatic inference of contrastive focus and presupposition processing

The present study used these two experiments to investigate how presupposition-related implicatures associated with contrastive focus are processed during sentence comprehension. Focus was linguistically marked using the particles shi (it-cleft) or zhiyou (‘only’) to mark the focused referent, and we manipulated the discourse context to mention either one person (consistent with the presupposition of shi) or two persons (consistent with the presupposition of zhiyou).

Experiment 1 showed that in one-person contexts, reading times for the focused referent were shorter with shi than with zhiyou, whereas no difference between the two conditions was observed in two-person contexts. Experiment 2 revealed a complementary pattern: in two-person contexts, total reading times for the post-focal region and total reading time on the context region were shorter with zhiyou than with shi, while in one-person contexts, no differences were found between the two conditions.