Discourse Expectations Are Sensitive to the Question Under Discussion: Evidence From ERPs

Abstract

Questions under Discussion (QUDs) have been suggested to influence the integration of individual utterances into a discourse-level representation. Previous work has shown that processing ungrammatical ellipses is facilitated when the elided material addresses an implicit QUD raised through a non-actuality implicature (NAIs; Grant et al., 2013). It is not clear, however, if QUDs influence discourse coherence during comprehension of fully acceptable discourse. We present two ERP studies examining the effects of QUDs introduced by NAIs using two-sentence discourses. Experiment 1 showed that processing definite NPs with inaccessible antecedents is facilitated when their content is relevant to the QUD. Using acceptable discourses, Experiment 2 showed that definite NPs failing to address a QUD elicit increased processing cost. Overall, our results indicate that QUDs raise the expectation that the following discourse will address them, providing unambiguous evidence that their influence is not limited to the processing of ungrammatical input.

An ERP study on the certainty of epistemic modality in predictive inference processing

“…Under this circumstance, Li (2015) and Ren et al (2018) did not observe the N400 effects of EMs and the critical words after EMs, whereas our experiment displayed clear N400 effects for VP1 and VP2 under the weak textual constraint condition. Our discrepancy exactly manifests the direction of a recent trend in the prediction that discourse expectations are sensitive to the question under discussion (Delogu et al, 2020) because words such as “want,” “need,” and “hope for” (like VP1s in our research) are intentional verbs (Delogu et al, 2010; Grant et al, 2012) that play an important role in generating expectations (Delogu et al, 2020). Only by doing so, can we prolong the prediction processing and observe the directionality function of EM during text reading.…”

“…The critical sentence adopted a future tense realised by VP1, namely “打算” (intend to) and “想要” (want to), which was counterbalanced. These VP1s (i.e., intentional verbs) served to evoke a prediction and helped readers predict VP2s rather than irrelevant results (Delogu et al, 2020). Our focus in this experiment was on VP1 and VP2, as underlined in Table 1.…”

Pragmatics Electrified

“…However, pragmatic mechanisms are involved also in several other language phenomena, on which electrophysiological investigation is still scarce. A non-exhaustive list includes the processing of scalars [170,172,173], negation [174,175] lies [176], and those phenomena at the interface with discourse factors, such as the questions under discussion (QUD) [177], or the interaction between prosody and information structure [178].…”