Abstract
Cognitive and linguistic theories of counterfactual language comprehension assume that counterfactuals convey a dual meaning. Subjunctive‐counterfactual conditionals (e.g., ‘If Tom had studied hard, he would have passed the test’) express a supposition while implying the factual state of affairs (Tom has not studied hard and failed). The question of how counterfactual dual meaning plays out during language processing is currently gaining interest in psycholinguistics. Whereas numerous studies using offline measures of language processing consistently support counterfactual dual meaning, evidence coming from online studies is less conclusive. Here, we review the available studies that examine online counterfactual language comprehension through behavioural measurement (self‐paced reading times, eye‐tracking) and neuroimaging (electroencephalography, functional magnetic resonance imaging). While we argue that these studies do not offer direct evidence for the online computation of counterfactual dual meaning, they provide valuable information about the way counterfactual meaning unfolds in time and influences successive information processing. Further advances in research on counterfactual comprehension require more specific predictions about how counterfactual dual meaning impacts incremental sentence processing.
Highlights
People often ponder over the alternatives to their earlier decisions and actions, consider unrealized possibilities or engage in mere fabulous imaginations
Counterfactual thinking is associated with the understanding of the perspectives and beliefs of others, which might qualify it as a developmental precursor of explicit Theory of Mind abilities (Peterson and Bowler 2000; Riggs et al 1998 but see Perner et al 2004 for an alternative perspective)
Similar to the results of Ferguson (2012), the world knowledge consistency effect was greatest following the factual context, whereas total reading times did not reveal an effect of counterfactual consistency. These results suggest that representation of counterfactual dual meaning is cognitively demanding and Nieuwland and Martin (2012) examined a related question in an EEG study using critical words that were expected from a counterfactual or a real-world context
Summary
People often ponder over the alternatives to their earlier decisions and actions, consider unrealized possibilities or engage in mere fabulous imaginations. Counterfactual thought enables people to reason about the cause of an event (Egan and Byrne 2015; Rips and Edwards 2013; Spellman and Mandel 1999) and thereby plays an important role in the processing of learning from experience (Barbey et al 2009; Byrne 1997) It promotes emotions such as regret and relief, and as such helps to regulate behaviour and emotions in order to adequately function in a physical and social environment (Epstude and Roese 2008; Frith 2013). Off line tasks collect meta-linguistic judgments after linguistic content has been presented and processed, which makes them useful to study explicit counterfactual reasoning and inference generation. The current review focuses on the available evidence for or against dual representation during online counterfactual processing
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