Focus Effects on Immediate and Delayed Recognition of Referents in Samoan.

This article investigates the effect of focus-marking on the immediate and delayed recognition of referents and their alternatives in Samoan, an Austronesian language that primarily uses syntactic focus-marking via a cleft-like 'o-fronting construction. Two experiments employing probe recognition tasks showed that in immediate processing, focus-marking on an object slowed recognition of both mentioned and unmentioned alternatives, consistent with increased activation of the entire alternative set causing interference. In delayed recognition, focus-marking facilitated faster recognition of mentioned alternatives and slowed rejection of unmentioned alternatives, suggesting sustained activation of the alternative set over time. These findings align with prior psycholinguistic research mainly conducted on Western Germanic languages using prosodic focus-marking, thereby providing cross-linguistic evidence that syntactic focus-marking in Samoan similarly signals relevant alternatives during discourse processing.