Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - FAHMRRR

Recall

“Recall” is the title of the third subproject of Katharina Spalek’s ERC project “Focus Alternatives in the Human Mind: Retrieval, Representation, and Recall”.

A number of experiments from different labs have now shown that focus alternatives play a role during human sentence comprehension. For example, words that represent a focus alternative in a certain context are remembered better than the same words when they are not processed as focus alternatives.

The starting point for the subproject was the previous observation that some listeners show considerably stronger focus alternative effects on recall than others. Consequently, in the present subproject we ask whether we can identify variables that affect listeners’ recall of focus alternatives. In a series of large-scale studies we are testing whether performance in tasks related to focus processing (e.g. drawing inferences), linguistic covariates (e.g. vocabulary knowledge) and more general cognitive capabilities (e.g. working memory) predict the size of focus alternative recall for spoken discourse.

 

Researcher in charge: Anne Felsenheimer