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Inefficient understanding of non-factive mental verbs with social aspect in adults: comparison to cognitive factive
Elena-Ioanna Nazlidou1, Despina Moraitou1, Demetrios Natsopoulos2
1Lab of Psychology, Department of Cognitive and Experimental Psychology, School of Psychology, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Hellas, Greece, demorait@psy.auth.gr.
Introduction:
Mental verbs denote inner mental states and are an important link between language and Theory of Mind ability conceptualized as mental state understanding. Non-factive mental verbs denote an obligation or intention and constitute a discrete class of mental verbs which are characterized by their social aspect. This study aimed to examine adults' ability to understand non-factive mental verbs with the social aspect as compared to cognitive factive mental verbs which denote a true event.
Methods:
A total of 94 participants, aged 18-95 years, were examined using two tasks measuring non-factive and factive verb processing, respectively, and a working memory test.
Results:
The results indicated that non-factive verbs process is at a significantly lower level than those of cognitive factives.
Conclusion:
The inspection of the way adapted to process the non-factive verbs denoting obligation or intention, as well as the confirmation of a unifactorial structure of the task developed to measure non-factives' processing, showed that adults have a common pattern of non-factive mental verb understanding, which is based on heuristic ways of thinking and is not affected by working memory capacity and age.
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