UCLA

Prior research connecting alternative semantics and language processing has proposed a two-stagemodel under which the alternative set is derived from the set of word semantically primed by pro- cessing an element in focus (Braun and Tagliapietra, 2010; Husband and Ferreira, 2016; Gotzner and Spalek, 2019). However, due to its dependence on semantic priming, the two-stage model faces a number of conceptual issues. Chiefly, foci are not always semantically related to their con- textually relevant alternatives. To address this concern, I run two cross-modal probe-recognition task experiments on discourses that make salient an alternative which is semantically related to the focus and another which is semantically unrelated to the focus. In doing so, I test the predictions of two proposed models for the selection of alternatives which emphasize the role of discourse rep- resentations over that of semantic priming: the immediate-access model and the delayed-access model. The results suggest that both related and unrelated alternatives are available almost imme- diately after focus is encountered. I take these results to support the immediate-access model.