The study of clausal ellipsis in sentence processing has revealed that comprehenders are sensitive to multiple, sometimes conflicting, pressures when recovering elided content. This paper presents a pupillometry experiment investigating how the human language processing system responds to sentences in which the location of a pitch accent clashes with global preferences for local correlates. The results are dis- cussed in light of existing literature, including the Enduring Focus Principle, in which locations for default pitch accent continue to influence focus-sensitive processes regardless of overt markers of focus.