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Anticipating the Damn Referent: How Comprehenders Rapidly Retrieve the Speaker's Attitude When Processing Negative
Camilo R Ronderos1, Filippo Domaneschi2
1Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo.
Cognitive Science
|May 19, 2023
Summary
Negative expressive adjectives like "damn" are rapidly processed, allowing listeners to quickly understand the speaker's attitude regardless of the word's position. This research clarifies online sentence comprehension of expressives.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistic Semantics
Background:
- Negative expressive adjectives (e.g., "damn") are theoretically speaker-oriented and syntactically flexible.
- The online sentence processing of these expressives, specifically the integration of speaker attitude, remains unclear.
- Previous research has not empirically investigated the incremental processing of negative expressives.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the incremental processing of Italian negative expressive adjectives.
- To determine if comprehenders rapidly integrate speaker attitude conveyed by expressives.
- To examine if syntactic position affects the understanding of speaker attitude.
Main Methods:
- An eye-tracking study was conducted on Italian speakers processing negative expressive adjectives.
- The study focused on the incremental integration of expressive content during sentence comprehension.
- Behavioral data (eye movements) were analyzed to infer processing mechanisms.
Main Results:
- Expressive content was rapidly integrated with information about the speaker's negative attitude.
- Comprehenders anticipated upcoming referents, indicating quick attitude integration.
- This rapid integration occurred irrespective of the expressive adjective's syntactic realization.
Conclusions:
- Comprehenders automatically retrieve a speaker's negative attitude using expressives as ostensive cues.
- The processing of speaker attitude from negative expressives is a rapid and automatic phenomenon.
- Syntactic flexibility does not impede the immediate understanding of speaker attitude.
Keywords:
Experimental pragmaticsExpressivesEye-trackingIncremental langauge processingNegative expressive adjectivesVisual world paradigmMore Related Videos
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