‘ ‘ If a lion could speak . . . ’ ’ : Online sensitivity to propositional truth - value of unrealistic counterfactual sentences
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چکیده
People can establish whether a sentence is hypothetically true even if what it describes can never be literally true given the laws of the natural world. Two event-related potential (ERP) experiments examined electrophysiological responses to sentences about unrealistic counterfactual worlds that require people to construct novel conceptual combinations and infer their consequences as the sentence unfolds in time (e.g., ‘‘If dogs had gills. . .’’). Experiment 1 established that without this premise, described consequences (e.g., ‘‘Dobermans would breathe under water . . .’’) elicited larger N400 responses than real-world true sentences. Incorporation of the counterfactual premise in Experiment 2 generated similar N400 effects of propositional truth-value in counterfactual and real-world sentences, suggesting that the counterfactual context eliminated the interpretive problems posed by locally anomalous sentences. This result did not depend on cloze probability of the sentences. In contrast to earlier findings regarding online comprehension of logical operators and counterfactuals, these results show that ongoing processing can be directly impacted by propositional truth-value, even that of unrealistic counterfactuals. 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
منابع مشابه
If the real world were irrelevant, so to speak: The role of propositional truth-value in counterfactual sentence comprehension.
Propositional truth-value can be a defining feature of a sentence's relevance to the unfolding discourse, and establishing propositional truth-value in context can be key to successful interpretation. In the current study, we investigate its role in the comprehension of counterfactual conditionals, which describe imaginary consequences of hypothetical events, and are thought to require keeping ...
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If the real world were irrelevant, so to speak: The role of propositional truth-value in counterfactual sentence comprehension Citation for published version: Nieuwland, MS & Martin , AE 2012, 'If the real world were irrelevant, so to speak: The role of propositional truth-value in counterfactual sentence comprehension' Cognition, vol 122, no. 1, pp. 102-109. General rights Copyright for the pu...
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تاریخ انتشار 2012