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Creating and Applying a Reference to Facilitate the Discussion and Classification of Proteins in a Diverse Group
Published on: August 16, 2017
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Processing references in context: when the polar bear does not meet a polar bear
Bettina Rolke1, Mareike Kirsten2, Verena C Seibold2
1Evolutionary Cognition, Department of Psychology, University of Tuebingen, Schleichstraße 4, 72076, Tuebingen, Germany. bettina.rolke@uni-tuebingen.de.
Cognitive Processing
|July 15, 2023
Summary
Understanding discourse is difficult with missing or conflicting context. This study shows that violations in determiner use, like "the," prolong reading times and lower acceptability, impacting comprehension.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
Background:
- Discourse comprehension relies on context to resolve referential ambiguity.
- Determiners like "the" and "a" carry presuppositions about referent existence and uniqueness.
- Violations of these presuppositions can impede understanding.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the processing of presupposition violations involving definite and indefinite determiners.
- To examine how missing or conflicting context information affects the interpretation of determiner presuppositions.
- To analyze the time course of processing uniqueness presuppositions.
Main Methods:
- Four experiments using word-by-word self-paced reading tasks to measure reading times.
- Acceptability judgments were collected to assess the impact of presupposition violations.
- Contextual information was manipulated to create missing or conflicting scenarios.
Main Results:
- Conflicting and missing context information led to reduced acceptability ratings.
- Processing difficulties were indicated by prolonged reading times.
- The specific pattern of results varied based on the type of presupposition and context supplementation.
Conclusions:
- Interpreting presuppositions involves complex cognitive processes to achieve coherent discourse understanding.
- Both missing and conflicting contextual information significantly disrupt discourse processing.
- The cognitive mechanisms engaged differ depending on the nature of the linguistic violation.
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