In sentence verification tasks involving under-informative statements such as Some elephants are mammals, some adults appear more tolerant to pragmatic violations than others. The underlying causes of such inter-individual variability remain however essentially unknown. Here, we investigated inter-individual variation in adults deriving the scalar inference “not all” triggered by the quantifier some. We first assessed the individual intolerance to pragmatic violations in adult participants presented with under-informative some-statements (e.g., Some infants are young). We then recorded event-related brain potentials in the same participants using an oddball paradigm where an ambiguous deviant word some presented in isolation had to be taken either as a match (in its literal interpretation “at least some”) or as a mismatch (in its pragmatic interpretation “some but not all”) and where an unambiguous deviant target word all was featured as control. Mean amplitude modulation of the classic P3b provided a measure of the ease with which participants considered some and all as deviants within each experimental block. We found that intolerance to pragmatic violations was associated with a reduction in the magnitude of the P3b effect elicited by the target some when it was to be considered a literal match. Furthermore, we failed to replicate a straightforward literal interpretation facilitation effect in our experiment which offers a control for task demands. We propose that the derivation of scalar inferences also relies on general, but flexible, mismatch resolution processes.
The human brain can learn contingencies built into stimulus sequences unconsciously. The quality of such implicit learning has been connected to stimulus social relevance, but results so far are inconsistent. We engaged participants in an implicit-intentional learning task in which they learned to discriminate between legal and illegal card triads on the sole basis of feedback provided within a staircase procedure. Half of the participants received feedback from pictures of faces with a happy or sad expression (social group) and the other half based on traffic light icons (symbolic group). We hypothesised that feedback from faces would have a greater impact on learning than that from traffic lights. Although performance during learning did not differ between groups, the feedback error-related negativity (fERN) was delayed by ~20 ms for social relative to symbolic feedback, and the P3b modulation elicited by infrequent legal card triads within a stream of illegal ones during the test phase was significantly larger in the symbolic than the social feedback group. Furthermore, the P3b mean amplitude recorded at test negatively correlated with the latency of the fERN recorded during learning. These results counterintuitively suggest that, relative to symbolic feedback, socially salient feedback interferes with implicit learning.
Plusieurs positions sont représentées dans la littérature concernant le lien entre la modalité telle qu’exprimée par devoir ou pouvoir et l’évidentialité (inférentielle notamment) : traditionnellement, ces verbes sont considérés comme modaux ; on les a également décrits comme « mixtes », i.e. évidentio-modaux ; ou encore évidentiels en ce qui concerne leurs emplois épistémiques ; et, récemment, on a défendu que devoir était un marqueur fondamentalement évidentiel, sans distinction de ses différents emplois. Nous défendons, dans cet article, que devoir et pouvoir sont sémantiquement modaux, une analyse exclusivement en termes d’évidentialité menant à une impasse. Cependant, nous tirons profit des analyses « évidentialisantes » en montrant que la récupération contextuelle par le destinataire des “evidences” est déterminante notamment en ce qui concerne leurs interprétations épistémiques subjectives vs objectives.
Some studies in experimental pragmatics have concluded that scalar inferences (e.g., 'some X are Y' implicates 'not all X are Y') are context-dependent pragmatic computations delayed relative to semantic computations. However, it remains unclear whether strong contextual support is necessary to trigger such inferences. Here we tested if the scalar inference 'not all' triggered by some can be evoked in a maximally neutral context. We investigated event-related potential (ERP) amplitude modulations elicited by Stroop-like conflicts in participants instructed to indicate whether strings of letters were printed with all their letters in upper case or otherwise. In a randomized stream of non-words and distractor words, the words all, some and case were either presented in capitals or they featured at least one lower case letter. As expected, we found a significant conflict-related N450 modulation when comparing e.g., 'aLl' with 'ALL'. Surprisingly, despite the fact that most responses from the same participants in a sentence-picture verification task were literal, we also found a similar modulation when comparing 'SOME' with e.g., 'SoMe', even though SOME could only elicit such a Stroop conflict when construed pragmatically. No such modulation was found for e.g., 'CasE' vs. 'CASE' (neutral contrast). These results suggest that some can appear incongruent with the concept of 'all' even when contextual support is minimal. Furthermore, there was no significant correlation between N450 effect magnitude ('SOME' minus e.g., 'sOMe') and pragmatic response rate recorded in the sentence-picture verification task. Overall, this study shows for the first time that the pragmatic meaning of some can be accessed in a maximally neutral context, and thus, that the scalar inference 'not all' triggered by some should be construed as context-sensitive rather than context-dependent, that is, more or less salient and relevant depending on the context rather than entirely contingent upon it.
Résumé. Dans cette contribution, nous présentons les premiers résultats d'une enquête visant à étudier la vitalité et l'aire d'extension de certains régionalismes du français parlé en Europe. Un questionnaire a été proposé et diffusé via les médias sociaux, mettant ainsi à profit la méthode dite du crowdsourcing, qui a permis de recueillir les réponses de plus de 10 000 francophones. L'enquête porte principalement sur des items lexicaux mais inclut également des régionalismes grammaticaux, plus rarement étudiés. Cet article présente les principes qui ont motivé la mise au point de cette enquête, la structure du questionnaire, les participants, ainsi que quelques résultats préliminaires. Nous nous interesserons ici en particulier à des faits linguistiques bien connus (l'idée étant de comparer nos données aux éléments fournis par les dictionnaires de régionalismes traditionnels). Nous présenterons une douzaine de questions du sondage, en précisant la tâche proposée et une visualisation des réponses sous forme de cartes. En regard des travaux précédents, plusieurs cas de figure se dessinent : certains régionalismes restent bien employés, alors que d'autres semblent en perte de vitesse. Dans d'autres cas, l'aire d'extension des variantes à l'étude est tellement large qu'on ne peut y voir un fait de variation régionale.Abstract. This paper presents the first results of a large survey which aimed at investigating the vitality and extension area of some regional expressions in spoken French in Europe. We took advantage of social media to broadcast our survey, using the crowdsourcing method. Therefore, we were able to gather responses from more than 10'000 French native speakers from France, Belgium and Switzerland. The survey not only investigates regional lexicon, but also regional syntactic features which have remained under-studied. In this paper, we explain how the survey has been built: its motivation, its structure, its participants; we also present preliminary results. We focus on the usual suspects: one of our aims is to compare our results with what specialised dictionaries generally state. We present a dozen questions of the survey with their results shown on maps. Compared to previous studies, our maps make clear that whereas the use of some regional expressions is enduring, the use of others is diminishing. Furthermore, the use of some items is distributed in such large areas that it makes difficult to continue considering them as regional variants., Web of Conferences 03001 (2016)
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.