Individual differences in recall of focus and alternatives.

Contrastive focus has been shown to enhance memory for focused elements and their contextual alternatives. However, recent work has shown that the memory effects of contrastive accenting vary across individuals. The present study investigates whether individual differences in memory for focus-relate...

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Publicado en:Memory & Cognition Vol. 54; no. 6; pp. 2289 - 2308
Autores principales: Sun, Chao, Felsenheimer, Anne, Koch, Xaver, Spalek, Katharina
Formato: Artículo
Publicado: Springer Nature Aug2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:Ver este registro en EBSCOhost
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        atl: Individual differences in recall of focus and alternatives.
      aug:
        au:
          Sun, Chao
          Felsenheimer, Anne
          Koch, Xaver
          Spalek, Katharina
        affil:
          https://ror.org/02v51f717 School of Chinese as a Second Language, Peking University, Beijing, China
          https://ror.org/0387jng26 Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
          https://ror.org/02jx3x895 Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, UK
          https://ror.org/01hcx6992 Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany
          https://ror.org/024z2rq82 Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany
      su:
        Dialects
        Task performance
        Linguistics
        Attention
        Memory
        Statistical correlation
        Statistical power analysis
        Cognitive testing
        Cluster analysis (Statistics)
        Research funding
        Research evaluation
        Kruskal-Wallis Test
        Logistic regression analysis
        Descriptive statistics
        Support vector machines
        Latent structure analysis
        Inferential statistics
        Data analysis software
        Verbal behavior
      sug:
        subj:
          Dialects
          Task performance
          Linguistics
          Attention
          Memory
          Statistical correlation
          Statistical power analysis
          Cognitive testing
          Cluster analysis (Statistics)
          Research funding
          Research evaluation
          Kruskal-Wallis Test
          Logistic regression analysis
          Descriptive statistics
          Support vector machines
          Latent structure analysis
          Inferential statistics
          Data analysis software
          Verbal behavior
      keyword:
        Alternatives
        Clustering analysis
        Focus
        Individual differences
        Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Psychology
        Alternatives
        Clustering analysis
        Focus
        Individual differences
        Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Psychology
      ab: Contrastive focus has been shown to enhance memory for focused elements and their contextual alternatives. However, recent work has shown that the memory effects of contrastive accenting vary across individuals. The present study investigates whether individual differences in memory for focus-related information reflect distinct recall patterns and which linguistic or cognitive abilities underlie these patterns. Native speakers of German completed a delayed-recall task in which contrastive focus was marked by pitch accenting, along with a battery of predictor tasks targeting different aspects of focus processing as well as broader linguistic and cognitive abilities. Using a probabilistic clustering approach, we identified two recall profiles that differed primarily in overall recall performance for focused elements and their alternatives. Participants who recalled more focus-related information also performed better on inference-based tasks, whereas prosodic perception and domain-general cognitive abilities did not predict recall profiles. These findings suggest that individual variability in the memory effects of contrastive focus is closely associated with inference-making ability and indicate that the encoding of contrast sets may be influenced by listener-specific inferential abilities.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Article
      src: R
    language: English
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