Abstract
Counterfactual thought allows people to consider alternative worlds they know to be false. Communicating these thoughts through language poses a social-communicative challenge because listeners typically expect a speaker to produce true utterances, but counterfactuals per definition convey information that is false. Listeners must therefore incorporate overt linguistic cues (subjunctive mood, such as in If I loved you then) in a rapid way to infer the intended counterfactual meaning. The present EEG study focused on the comprehension of such counterfactual antecedents and investigated if pragmatic ability—the ability to apply knowledge of the social-communicative use of language in daily life—predicts the online generation of counterfactual worlds. This yielded two novel findings: (1) Words that are consistent with factual knowledge incur a semantic processing cost, as reflected in larger N400 amplitude, in counterfactual antecedents compared to hypothetical antecedents (If sweets were/are made of sugar). We take this to suggest that counterfactuality is quickly incorporated during language comprehension and reduces online expectations based on factual knowledge. (2) Individual scores on the Autism Quotient Communication subscale modulated this effect, suggesting that individuals who are better at understanding the communicative intentions of other people are more likely to reduce knowledge-based expectations in counterfactuals. These results are the first demonstration of the real-time pragmatic processes involved in creating possible worlds.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13415-016-0433-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Counterfactual thought allows people to consider alternative worlds they know to be false
2 Department of Psychology, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. Communication subscale modulated this effect, suggesting that individuals who are better at understanding the communicative intentions of other people are more likely to reduce knowledge-based expectations in counterfactuals
Based on the prediction that mood effects should be restricted to true clauses, we resolved this interaction by truth-value, which has the additional advantage of comparing critical words that are semantically related to the preceding context. This revealed a significant mood by hemisphere interaction in the true, F(1, 22) = 6.81, p < .05, and a weaker interaction effect in the false condition, F(1, 22) = 4.39, p < .05. Further resolving both interaction effects showed that true counterfactual clauses elicited significantly larger N400s compared to true hypothetical clauses in the right, mean difference 1.24 μV; t(22) = 3.15, p < .01, but not the left hemisphere, mean difference 0.70 μV; t(22) = 1.89, p =
Summary
Counterfactual thought allows people to consider alternative worlds they know to be false. Just as children with autism miss the social purpose of pretence play (Leslie, 1992), they may not understand the communicative intention to temporarily accept a false proposition as true in order to reason about it (e.g., Leevers & Harris, 2000; Surian, Baron-Cohen, & Van der Lely, 1996; see Baron-Cohen, 2008). Such pragmatic deficit could impede the successful set-up of a counterfactual possible world (If elephants had wings...), subsequently interfering with counterfactual reasoning Developmental, clinical, and neuroimaging findings suggest a close relationship between pragmatic skills and counterfactual reasoning
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