Hungarian Structural Focus: Accessibility to Focused Elements and Their Alternatives in Working Memory and Delayed Recognition Memory

Abstract

The present work investigates the memory accessibility of linguistically focused elements and the representation of the alternatives for these elements (i.e., their possible replacements) in Working Memory (WM) and in delayed recognition memory in the case of the Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction (preVf). In two probe recognition experiments we presented preVf and corresponding focusless neutral sentences embedded in five-sentence stories. Stories were followed by the presentation of sentence probes in one of three conditions: (i) the probe was identical to the original sentence in the story, (ii) the focused word (i.e., target) was replaced by a semantically related word and (iii) the target word was replaced by a semantically unrelated but contextually suitable word. In Experiment 1, probes were presented immediately after the stories measuring WM performance, while in Experiment 2, blocks of six stories were presented and sentences were probed with a 2-minute delay measuring delayed recognition memory performance. Results revealed an advantage of the focused element in immediate but not in delayed retrieval. We found no effect of sentence type on the recognition of the two different probe types in WM performance. However, results pertaining to the memory accessibility of focus alternatives in delayed retrieval showed an interference effect resulting in a lower memory performance. We conclude that this effect is indirect evidence for the enhanced activation of focus alternatives. The present work is novel in two respects. First, no study has been conducted on the memory representation of focused elements and their alternatives in the case of the structurally marked Hungarian pre-verbal focus construction. Second, to our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the focus representation accounts for WM and delayed recognition memory using the same stimuli and same measured variables. Since both experiments used exactly the same stimulus set, and they only differed in terms of the timing of recognition probes, the principle of ceteris paribus fully applied with respect to how we addressed our research question regarding the two different memory systems.

The Influence of Focus on the Activation of Alternatives in Speech Production—An Online Picture-Word-Interference Experiment

“…In language comprehension, Gotzner et al (2016) observed for German that the recognition of mentioned alternatives is harder when focus is marked with particles. Calhoun et al (2023) report similar findings for Samoan, where focus is marked by cleft-like structures, as do Káldi et al (2021) for the preverbal focus construction in Hungarian. By contrast, Yan and Calhoun (2020) found that prosodic focus marking in Mandarin Chinese and in English, facilitated the decision that an alternative had not been mentioned.…”

"Czech" the Alternatives: A Probe Recognition Study of Focus and Word Order

“…As far as response times were concerned, the authors report no effects of probe type or sentence type. Overall, the study of Káldi et al (2021) suggests that the research on the improved memory representation of alternatives can be extended to languages with syntactically marked focus. However, their results are largely inconclusive.…”

“…However, languages can also use syntactic means as their primary way of focus marking (Zimmermann and Onea, 2011).There have only been a few studies examining focus alternative processing in languages that primarily use syntactic means to mark focus. Studying Hungarian, Káldi et al (2021) also examined the memory representation of the focused element and of alternatives and provided evidence suggesting that the recall of the focused element was facilitated. This was in line with the previous literature.…”