In this review we provide a discussion of the concept of alternatives and its role in linguistic
and psycholinguistic theorizing in the context of the contributions that have appeared in the …

The function of focus is to activate a set of alternatives, providing the locus for focus‐
sensitive particles like only. In the past decade, psycholinguistic research has shown that …

Converging evidence points to a role for the hippocampus in statistical learning, but open
questions about its necessity remain. Evidence for necessity comes from Schapiro and …

There remains little consensus about whether there exist meaningful individual differences
in syntactic processing and, if so, what explains them. We argue that this partially reflects the …

Successful language comprehension often requires comprehenders to infer contrastive
focus alternatives, but the mechanisms used to establish contrastive alternatives are still …

Much is known about how the emotional content of words affects memory for those words,
but only recently have researchers begun to investigate whether emotional content …

Although children typically comprehend the links between specific forms and their meanings
before they produce the forms themselves, the opposite pattern also occurs. The nature of …

Psycholinguistic research has long established that focus-marked words have a processing
advantage over other words in an utterance, eg, they are recognized more quickly and …

Past research has demonstrated that young children and nonhuman animals are able to
reason by elimination (“If not A, then B”) by relying on visual cues such as seeing that one …

Readers progressed through a sentence in the Maze task (Forster et al., 2009), deciding at
each word between a sensical and a non-sensical continuation. Contexts presented before …