Presentation
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When the order is irrelevant and when it matters: order violations in conjuctions.
Poster B14 in Poster Session B, Tuesday, October 24, 3:30 - 5:15 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Maria Spychalska1; 1Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Conjunctive sentences reporting two past events, e.g., “She wrote a letter and read a book”, suggest that the events happened in the order of mentioning, even if there is no direct link between the events. In Gricean pragmatics, this phenomenon is often described as “temporal implicature”, and is explained in terms of the speaker’s cooperativity. Other authors have proposed that the phenomenon may result from a more general property of discourse or narration structure. It is still an open question to what extend the temporal representation of events as observed in the real life modulates the linguistic processing, in particular, whether the temporal modulates the predictive processing in language. I present results of a series of ERP experiments investigating the role of contextual relevance of the temporal order for the processing of reversed order sentences. The experimental paradigm resembles a memory game, in which participants assigned points to a virtual player and read sentences describing game events. In each trial, four cards were dealt and the player flipped two of them. Afterwards, the participants assigned points based on the game rules: If the player flipped two cards from the same category (animal or object), she got 1 point. If she flipped two cards from different categories, the points depended on which category was first. Subsequently, a sentence was presented word-by-word describing the game trial, e.g., “Julia has flipped a cat and a flower”. In the Correct-Order condition, sentences described the events in the order in which they happened; in the Reversed-Order condition, the events were described in the reversed order. Reversed-Order conditions, both for conditions where the order was relevant and irrelevant for the points, showed a P600 effect relative to Correct-Order conditions at the first noun at which the order violation could be detected. In addition, Reversed-Order conditions elicited a larger N400 than Correct-Order conditions. In a follow-up experiment, participants gave points only based on whether the cards come from the same category and, thus, the order was irrelevant in the whole experimental context. A similar P600 effect was observed for the order violation but no modulation of the N400. Thus, irrespective of whether the attention was directed towards the order as relevant in the given context, the violation of the order in the linguistic report engages reprocessing mechanisms, as indicated by the P600 effect, which can be linked to revising of the temporal representation. The N400 component was only modulated by the encoded order if the order was contextually relevant. In the third experiment, sentences with “and” along with sentences with explicit temporal connectives “before” and “after” were used. In this case, order violation at the first noun triggered an N400 effect, suggesting that the experimental context where order was relevant for the linguistic report, created an expectation for the first event to mentioned in the first sentence position. Effects on the second noun indicated a late positivity effect for reversed order sentences with “and” and a sustained negativity for the order violation in sentences with “before”.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Meaning: Lexical Semantics