If the real world were irrelevant, so to speak: The role of propositional truth-value in counterfactual sentence comprehension

Explorer If the real world were irrelevant , so to speak : The role of propositional truth - value in counterfactual sentence comprehension

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...

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 ...

‘ ‘ If a lion could speak . . . ’ ’ : Online sensitivity to propositional truth - value of unrealistic counterfactual sentences

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 sente...

Establishing propositional truth-value in counterfactual and real- world contexts during sentence comprehension: Differential sensitivity of the left and right inferior frontal gyri

Establishing propositional truth-value in counterfactual and real-world contexts during sentence comprehension: Differential sensitivity of the left and right inferior frontal gyri

What makes a proposition true or false has traditionally played an essential role in philosophical and linguistic theories of meaning. A comprehensive neurobiological theory of language must ultimately be able to explain the combined contributions of real-world truth-value and discourse context to sentence meaning. This fMRI study investigated the neural circuits that are sensitive to the propo...