We attempted to replicate a foundational study by Cutler and Fodor (1979).

Cutler and Fodor found shorter reaction times to words focused by preceding questions.

They argued that both discourse and prosody guide attention to new information.

We successfully replicated their findings using updated statistical analyses.

We report the results of a replication attempt of a foundational study by Cutler and Fodor (1979). This study sparked several lines of research into the role of information structure in language comprehension, based on the proposal that discourse characteristics, prosodic focus, and syntactic focusing constructions may all guide the comprehender’s attention to new important information. Using a phoneme monitoring task, Cutler and Fodor reported that word-initial phonemes in acoustically identical sentences were identified faster when the word had been focused, as opposed to de-focused, by a preceding question. This influential finding has not been replicated using current experimental and statistical standards. Additionally, later research on this topic has deviated considerably from Cutler and Fodor’s original proposal and has led to contradictory results. We attempted to replicate the original study following current standards for performing statistical analyses and assessed whether the results of these analyses differ from those obtained from analyses more similar to those conducted originally. We found that in our data, the critical interaction between focus and target position reported by Cutler and Fodor replicates using both the original and the updated analyses, while the two (less important) main effects of focus and target position were only replicated using the updated analyses. This replication provides a stronger foundation to these diverging lines of research, and it is likely to spark new investigations into information structure.

Focus

Information structure

Phoneme monitoring

Reaction times

Discourse

Replication

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