Information Integration in Modulation of Pragmatic Inferences During Online Language Comprehension

Information Integration in Online Modulation of Pragmatic Inferences during Language Comprehension

Upon hearing a scalar adjective in a definite referring expression such as " the big…, " listeners typically interpret the speaker to be referring to an item in a contrast set denoted by the scalar adjective, such as a big glass in the context of a smaller glass. This inference guides online visual search for a referent, resulting in anticipatory eye-movements to the target object when a contra...

Electrophysiology and Pragmatic Language Comprehension

Speaker knowledge influences the comprehension of pragmatic inferences.

Inferring what speakers mean from what they say requires consideration of what they know. For instance, depending on the speaker's level of expertise, uttering Some squirrels hibernate can imply that not all squirrels hibernate, or it might imply the weaker proposition that the speaker does not know whether all squirrels hibernate. The present study examines the extent to which speaker knowledg...

Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension.

Psycholinguists have commonly assumed that as a spoken linguistic message unfolds over time, it is initially structured by a syntactic processing module that is encapsulated from information provided by other perceptual and cognitive systems. To test the effects of relevant visual context on the rapid mental processes that accompany spoken language comprehension, eye movements were recorded wit...

Pragmatic inferences modulate N400 during sentence comprehension: evidence from picture-sentence verification.

The present study examines the online realization of pragmatic meaning using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants read sentences including the English quantifier some, which has both a semantic meaning (at least one) and a pragmatic meaning (not all). Unlike previous ERP studies of this phenomenon, sentences in the current study were evaluated not in terms of their truth with respect t...