Conditionals on crutches: Expanding the modal horizon

Abstract

Using truth-value judgment tasks, we investigated the on-line processing of counterfactual conditionals such as "If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over". Face-value plausibility of the counterfactual as well as the complexity of the antecedent were manipulated. Results show that readers' judgments deviate from face-value plausibility more often when the antecedent is complex, and when the counterfactual is plausible rather than implausible. We interpret our results based on the modal horizon assumption of von Fintel (2001) and argue that they are compatible with a variably strict semantics for counterfactuals (Lewis, 1973). We make use of computational modeling techniques to account for reaction times and truth-value judgments simultaneously, showing that implementing detailed process models deepens our understanding of the cognitive mechanisms triggered by linguistic stimuli.

How do linguistic illusions arise? Rational inference and good-enough processing as competing latent processes within individuals

“…This amounts to the assumption that the respective accumulator is "passive" in the sense that it is unaffected by the properties of the sentence, and that the associated response is only produced differentially across conditions as a consequence of the other accumulators being affected by the manipulations. The response associated with the unaffected accumulator can thus be seen as a default response in the simplified model (Paape and Zimmermann, 2020;Nicenboim and Vasishth, 2018). Question 2 can be approached in a similar way, namely by removing all slope parameters related to the individual differences measures from the model.…”

“…For previous applications of race models to sentence processing, see e.g Nicenboim and Vasishth (2018),Paape and Zimmermann (2020),Lissón et al (2021),Logačev and Vasishth (2016)…”