Predicting contrastive alternatives in the comprehension of focus

How and when are focus alternatives identified during real-time language processing? I will raise the possibility that, at least in certain contexts, comprehenders can anticipate the relevance of a particular set of contrastive alternatives, before focus has been encountered. Evidence in favor of such predictive processing would run counter to a class of existing approaches, whereby alternatives are distinguished from non-alternatives after focus has been encountered (e.g., Husband & Ferreira 2016). I will briefly review the relevant literature and present some in-progress ideas about how to probe the existence of such a prediction.