Replication of Cutler, A., & Fodor, J. A. (1979). Semantic focus and sentence comprehension. Cognition, 7(1), 49–59

•We attempted to replicate a foundational study by Cutler and Fodor (1979).•Cutler and Fodor found shorter reaction times to words focused by preceding questions.•They argued that both discourse and prosody guide attention to new information.•We successfully replicated their findings using updated statistical analyses.