Posters: Language III

Definite determiners trigger existence- and uniqueness-presuppositions, that is, the speaker assumes that it is taken for granted that there exists exactly one of the mentioned objects in the relevant discourse. Indefinite determiners are associated with anti-uniqueness, that is, that there are several of the mentioned object. According to the Maximize Presupposition principle, this additional meaning component arises as an “anti-presupposition” and involves first considering the definite determiner’s uniqueness-presupposition and then negating it. Building on previous work by Schneider et al. (2019, Cognition) we investigate processing of the two determiners in more detail and ask whether this processing is automatic or requires limited central capacities. We employed the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) approach and the locus of slack-logic and combined a tone discrimination with a sentence evaluation task. We observed more difficult processing for the indefinite compared to the definite determiner as would be expected if the anti-uniqueness inference arises from a negation of the uniqueness-presupposition of the definite determiner. Further, the data revealed more difficult processing with infelicitous compared to felicitous sentences. The whole pattern is in line with the idea of immediate, but capacity-limited processing of presuppositions. These results support the Maximize Processing principle and are an important step forward toward understanding cognitive processing in presupposition processing.

Picture naming takes longer in the presence of a semantic-categorically related distractor word compared to an unrelated distractor word. This semantic interference effect in the picture-word interference (PWI) task is an empirical cornerstone in speech production research and of central importance in theory development and evaluation. Prominent models locate the effect at an abstract lexical level, yet only few studies have tested for a possible pre-lexical, conceptual contribution. Moreover, those studies that did are not conclusive. We re-explored the locus of semantic interference by contrasting two task versions that were implemented as parallel as possible, but differed with respect to the processing stages involved: naming pictures (requiring conceptual processing and lexical processing) and deciding on their natural size (requiring conceptual processing only). We predicted semantic interference in naming, replicating the standard effect. If part of the effect is localized at the conceptual level, we predicted interference in size decision, too. We found semantic effects in both tasks but with different polarity – interference in naming and facilitation in size decision. This pattern supports the view that semantic interference in PWI has its locus at the lexical level and its origin at the conceptual level.

Negation is typically hard to process, but it is nevertheless omnipresent in our everyday language. Models of language comprehension claim that pragmatically licensed negation use makes comprehending negation as easy as comprehending affirmation. One way of pragmatically licensing negation is to use it to refer to exceptions (e.g., This swan is not white). However, the experimental evidence supporting this claim is mixed. In the current study, we further investigated this question by creating visual world scenes that either involved an exceptional object or not. More specifically, we had biased displays where for example three children had an apple each (= majority object) and one child had a cloud (= exception), and unbiased displays where for example two children had an apple and two a cloud. In each trial participants read either an affirmative or a negative statement about a highlighted child in the display. Their task was to judge the truth of the statement. When looking at the judgement times for true sentences, we find an interaction between the polarity of the sentence and the child referred to in biased displays. Judging a negated sentence seems especially hard when it is about the child with the majority object in the biased display, where the negation is not pragmatically felicitous. Surprisingly however, the pragmatically felicitous negation referring to the exception in biased displays did not show the expected facilitation compared to the pragmatically infelicitous negation in unbiased displays. Implications for pragmatic theories of language comprehension will be discussed.

Testing effect refers to the finding of facilitated learning in conditions in which participants study and receive practice tests with conditions in which they receive an equivalent amount of further studying in lieu of practice tests. In more educational terms the testing effect can be compared with formative assessment which is used to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback. In the present study, we have investigated whether the testing effect can also be found when learning complicated grammatical structures. We used the artificial language Brocanto for this purpose. 26 participants studied 96 grammatically sentences during four learning phases of the artificial language BROCANTO to learn the underlying grammatical rules. There were two groups. During each learning phase, the study group received half of the items again for learning; the testing group had a test instead of the learning phase of group one. At the end of the experiment there was a final test, which the subjects repeated 48 hours later. Results replicated the typical testing effect demonstrating an advantage of restudying over testing on a final test immediately after the initial learning but the opposite effect at a retention interval of 48h. These results indicate that testing also has a positive effect on long-term-retention when learning complex materials.