Focus effects on quantifier domains in a visual verification task

In a visual verification study we investigated how syntactic focus affects the interpretation of quantifiers. We compared the effect of syntactic focus on the truth conditions of sentences with the quantificational adverb only and the superlative quantifier most in Polish. In this language, the scopal properties of most as well as the syntactic construction of the sentence final focus allowed us to predict parallel focus association patterns for both quantifiers. We found that, indeed, syntactic focus is able to guide the attention during visual verification. It is known that prosodic focus is immediately integrated during semantic processing, our study is the first to demonstrate that syntactic focus can facilitate the verification of the truth of a sentence, by guiding attention towards the more salient information in the picture, i.e., the set of focus alternatives.

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