Syntactic focusing structures influence discourse processing

In 5 experiments, we investigated how syntactic focusing structures such as "There was this..." and "It was the..." influence discourse processing during reading. In Experiment 1, participants read brief stories and continued them by writing sentences of their own. Constituents introduced with a focusing structure were more likely to be referred to in story continuations than were concepts introduced with a neutral determiner (a, an, or the). Probe recognition experiments (2a, 2b, and 3) demonstrated that, when a concept in the subject position was probed immediately, syntactic focus had no effect, but responses were faster than when the probed concept was not in the subject position. When the probe was delayed, syntactically focused concepts were recognized faster than were concepts in the subject position that had not been focused (Experiment 4). These results indicate that syntactic focus increases salience and strengthens the memory trace of concepts in readers' discourse representations.