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 …

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 …

This article critically evaluates the notion of contrast and discusses the role that contrast has
been claimed to have in grammar. It argues that a precise understanding of grammatical …

Although the positive effects of iconic gestures on word recall and comprehension by
children have been clearly established, less is known about the benefits of beat gestures …

While recent research has shown that iconic gestures and the so-called pitch gestures (or
gestures that mimic melody in speech) favour word learning in a second language, little is …

Prominence, the expression of informational weight within utterances, can be signaled by
prosodic highlighting (head-prominence, as in English) or by position (as in Korean edge …

The semantics of focus particles like only requires a set of alternatives (Rooth, 1992). In two
experiments, we investigated the impact of such particles on the retrieval of alternatives that …

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 …