Abstract
Previous research in cognitive science and psycholinguistics has shown that language users are able to predict upcoming linguistic input probabilistically, pre-activating material on the basis of cues emerging from different levels of linguistic abstraction, from phonology to semantics. Current evidence suggests that linguistic prediction also operates at the level of pragmatics, where processing is strongly constrained by context. To test a specific theory of contextually-constrained processing, termed pragmatic surprisal theory here, we used a self-paced reading task where participants were asked to view visual scenes and then read descriptions of those same scenes. Crucially, we manipulated whether the visual context biased readers into specific pragmatic expectations about how the description might unfold word by word. Contrary to the predictions of pragmatic surprisal theory, we found that participants took longer reading the main critical term in scenarios where they were biased by context and pragmatic constraints to expect a given word, as opposed to scenarios where there was no pragmatic expectation for any particular referent.
Highlights
Prediction in online processing has been a central theme in recent cognitive scientific and psycholinguistic research
The data was cleaned according to two criteria: first, for any given trial, if the total Reading times (RTs) differed by 2.5 positive or negative standard deviations from the mean total reading time for the respective condition, the trial was excluded from any subsequent analysis; for any given participant, if their number of excluded trials was larger than 30% of the total number of trials, the participant was excluded from any subsequent analysis
Summary We found reliable differences in RTs at the shape term (SHAPE) region, but these differences were in the opposite direction of what was predicted by pragmatic surprisal theory, which explains
Summary
Prediction in online processing has been a central theme in recent cognitive scientific and psycholinguistic research (see, inter alia, Bubic et al, 2010; Clark, 2013; Kuperberg and Jaeger, 2016). As for pragmatics, many studies have provided evidence that high-level semantic and pragmatic prediction occurs while people process language, from the processing of negation (e.g., Nieuwland, 2016; Haase et al, 2019; see Scappini et al, 2015; Darley et al, 2020) to the processing of sentences containing potentially pragmatic cues such as the scalar quantifier some (e.g., Nieuwland et al, 2010; Augurzky et al, 2019). Studies relying on the manipulation of the pictorial context which the linguistic stimuli refer to show that people are sensitive to contextually induced pragmatic expectation (Degen and Tanenhaus, 2016; Spychalska et al, 2016; Augurzky et al, 2019; Darley et al, 2020). There is evidence that language users form expectations about the unfolding linguistic signal based on an expectation of pragmatic felicity of the utterance in a particular visually-anchored context
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