Poster E33, Thursday, August 22, 2019, 3:45 – 5:30 pm, Restaurant Hall
Task effects on pragmatic inference calculation
Tal Tehan1, Einat Shetreet1;1Tel Aviv University
Statements such as ‘Some elephants have trunks’ are ambiguous: some speakers accept them as true, adopting a logical interpretation (they understand ‘some’ as ‘some and possibly all’), while, most speakers reject these statements as false, adopting a pragmatic interpretation through the calculation of a scalar implicature (they interpret ‘some’ to mean ‘some but not all’; e.g., Huang & Snedeker, 2009; Noveck, 2001, Papafragou & Musolino, 2003). It has been suggested that the calculation of scalar implicatures depends on extra-linguistic high-cognitive functions (e.g., Foppolo et al., 2012; Shetreet et al., 2014). This study examines the role of task in scalar implicature calculation, focusing on these extra-linguistic functions, in two fMRI experiments with Hebrew speakers. In Experiment 1, participants had to judge whether sentences including the equivalent of ‘some’ (‘xelek’) or ‘all’ (‘kol’) matched a picture in which all, some or none of the items shared the trait included in the sentence. In our critical condition, ‘some’ was presented with “all-pictures” (e.g. ‘some of the squares are red’ for a picture of five red squares), so that it involved scalar implicature calculation. Preliminary results show that this condition is associated with increased activations in a network of frontal and prefrontal regions, including the ACC and BA 10 & 11, which were also observed with scalar implicature calculation in English speakers (Shetreet et al., 2014). Similar activations were observed in a subset of participants who accepted the critical condition as true (i.e. assigning a logical meaning to “some”). In Experiment 2 (which was always performed after Experiment 1), we used a picture-selection task (similar to Horowitz & Frank, 2015). In this task, participants listened to sentences including ‘some’ or ‘all’ and had to select one of three pictures (presented simultaneously), in which all, some or none of the objects shared the trait included in the sentence. Here, “some-pictures” were exclusively selected following “some-sentences” by all the participants, including those who responded logically in Experiment 1. An ROI analysis in BA 10 & 11 revealed that, as opposed to Experiment 1, “some-sentences” and “all-sentences” showed no significant differences. The results from Experiment 1 confirm that in Hebrew, like in English, certain pragmatic inferences recruit extra-linguistic processes, given that some of the observed activations have been implicated in studies of high cognitive functions, such as decision making. Differential activations even in speakers that did not adopt the pragmatic interpretation indicates that they too had to engage in a decision-making process, which suggests that they considered both logical and pragmatic interpretations (that is, they too calculated the implicature). Results from Experiment 2 with no differential activations in regions implicated in decision making could suggest that only the pragmatic interpretation of ‘some’ was considered, possibly due to the contrast between “all-pictures” and “some-pictures”. Thus, in certain contexts, no competition between the logical and pragmatic interpretations is present in both participants that initially adopted the pragmatic interpretation, and those that adopted the logical one.
Themes: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Control, Selection, and Executive Processes
Method: Functional Imaging