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Speakers’ privileged knowledge affects the listeners’ processing of counter-expectational meaning in discourse comprehension
Poster E16 in Poster Session E, Thursday, October 26, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Xun Li1, Xiaoming Jiang2, Xiaolin Zhou3; 1Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China
Counter-expectation sentences, featured by a counter-expectation marker, are used to describe events contrary to speakers’ expectation, as in “Inside the spectacle case should (jingran: counter-expectation marker) be a bracelet”. Previous studies have been found that the world-knowledge shared by the speaker and the listener influence the listener’s comprehension of counter-expectation sentences. However, little is known about how the listener could use the speaker’s privileged knowledge to process counter-expectation sentences. We conducted an EEG experiment and asked participants to read simple conversational scenarios, each consisting of a context and a directly-quoted utterance. The context described whether the speaker saw a third person placing objects in a location (S: see vs. NS: no see) and the utterance, in the form of “Locative +counter-expectation marker + verb + object”, described an event of high-likelihood (HE, e.g., Inside the jewel case is a bracelet) or low-likelihood (LE, e.g., Inside the spectacle case is a bracelet). After reading each scenario, participants were asked to make a comprehension judgment. Analyses of event-related potentials (ERPs) on the following critical words showed that: 1) Counter-expectation marker: In 200-800ms, compared with the NS conditions, the S conditions evoked a more sustained positivity in the centro-parietal and parietal regions; 2) Object noun: In 370-460ms, for the S conditions, compared with the HE condition, the LE condition elicited a larger negativity; this effect was absent in the NS conditions. In 600-800 ms, for S conditions, no significant difference was found between the HE and LE conditions. However, for NS conditions, compared with the LE condition, the HE condition elicited a larger negativity. We argue that: 1) The effect on the counter-expectation marker reflects the listener’s detection of a conflict between the marker and the context in which the speaker actually saw what has happened (and hence should not use the counter-expectation maker); 2) The effect on the object noun reflects the constraint of the speaker’s privilege knowledge on the listener’s processing of the object noun. When the speaker actually has seen what happened (the S condition), the listener only computes the event possibility based on his real-world knowledge, without computing the counter-expectational meaning. However, when the speaker did not see what happened (the NS condition), the listener could adopt the speaker’s privileged knowledge and re-interpretate incongruent HE sentences. Key words: speakers’ privileged knowledge, counter-expectation sentences, ERP, sustained positivity, early negativity, late negativity
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics,