Investigating scalar implicatures in a truth-value judgement task: evidence from event-related brain potentials

By Maria Spychalska, Jarmo Kontinen, Markus Werning. 2016

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It is considered underinformative to say Some As are B when it is known that all As are B. Such underinformative sentences receive divergent truth-value judgements: whereas so-called logical responders evaluate them to be true, pragmatic responders reject them as false. In a sentence-picture verification experiment, we found that the split in the behavioural responses correlates with the difference in the event-related potentials (ERP) signal (N400 and P600) recorded for underinformative and for unambiguously true or false sentences with some. However, the ERP patterns for sentences with all are similar for both groups. In contrast to previous findings, the effect is independent of the subjects' autistic spectrum quotients. Assuming that the N400 amplitude is inversely correlated with the expected probability of the critical word we argue that the observed between-group difference in the ERP pattern can be explained by the hypothesis that ‘logicians’ and ‘pragmatists’ use distinct verification strategies in evaluating sentences with the quantifier some.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/56a48d7ae5ebcbc0ccf566411e1708e657d71ca6