Contrastive focus highlights the information in the discourse that challenges the existing assumptions. Psycholinguistic evidence shows that contrastive focus is interpreted by activating focus alternatives. However, there is not much evidence on whether the activation of focus alternatives in the production and comprehension systems is similar or different. The current study investigates how contrastive prosody and the resulting activation of focus-alternatives influence lexical access during word production and word recognition. In two experiments, we used cross- modal priming with prosodic focus (narrow vs. contrastive) and semantic relatedness (within- category focus alternatives vs. unrelated control items) as experimental factors. In Experiment 1, we assessed picture naming latencies, and in Experiment 2, we employed a lexical decision task. We expected a semantic interference (Experiment 1) or facilitation effect (Experiment 2) when processing items from the same semantic category. Furthermore, we expected that these effects would be modulated by contrastive prosodic focus. The observed interference (Experiment 1) and the facilitation (Experiment 2) for focus alternatives confirmed earlier findings that same-category prime-target pairs lead to interference in production, and facilitation in comprehension. However, the absence of a modulation of these effects by prosodic focus suggested that the relationship between contrastive prosody and the activation of focus alternatives may be weaker than previously thought, and might depend on other factors.