What happened (and what did not): Discourse constraints on encoding of plausible alternatives

Three experiments investigated how font emphasis influences reading and remembering discourse. Although past work suggests that contrastive pitch contours benefit memory by promoting encoding of salient alternatives, it is unclear both whether this effect generalizes to other forms of linguistic prominence and how the set of alternatives is constrained. Participants read discourses in which some true propositions had salient alternatives (e.g., British scientists found the endangered monkey when the discourse also mentioned French scientists) and completed a recognition memory test. In Experiments 1 and 2, font emphasis in the initial presentation increased participants' ability to later reject false statements about salient alternatives but not about unmentioned items (e.g., Portu-guese scientists). In Experiment 3, font emphasis helped reject false statements about plausible alternatives, but not about less plausible alternatives that were nevertheless established in the discourse. These results suggest readers encode a narrow set of only those alternatives plausible in the particular discourse. They also indicate that multiple manipulations of linguistic prominence, not just prosody, can lead to consideration of alternatives. Introduction Understanding and remembering a discourse may involve representing not only what is true but also salient alternative propositions that are not true. For instance, Fraundorf, Watson, and Benjamin (2010) reported evidence that certain prosodic contours in spoken discourse, described in detail below, led listeners to encode information about a salient alternative in the discourse, such as The Scottish knight won as an alternative to The English knight won in (1b). This information helped listeners remember the events of the discourse. In particular, remembering that the Scottish knight lost the tournament helped listeners later reject Scottish as the winner. But, it did not affect their ability to reject an unmentioned item like Welsh, which was never part of a salient alternative in the discourse. (1a) The English and the Scottish knights held a jousting tournament. (1b) The ENGLISH knight won. But while there is general evidence that important alternatives may be encoded as part of a discourse representation , it is unclear exactly how that set of alternatives is defined. Comprehenders might consider a relatively broad set of alternatives, such as alternative propositions related to any discourse entities in the same semantic category. Alternately, they might consider only those alternative propositions that are made particularly salient or plausible in the discourse. It is similarly unclear what cues lead comprehenders to encode these alternative sets. Fraundorf et al. (2010) manipulated a …