Huang Yi Ting, Snedeker Jesse
Department of Psychology, William James Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
Cogn Psychol. 2009 May;58(3):376-415. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2008.09.001. Epub 2008 Nov 1.
Scalar implicature has served as a test case for exploring the relations between semantic and pragmatic processes during language comprehension. Most studies have used reaction time methods and the results have been variable. In these studies, we use the visual-world paradigm to investigate implicature. We recorded participants' eye movements during commands like "Point to the girl that has some of the socks" in the presence of a display in which one girl had two of four socks and another had three of three soccer balls. These utterances contained an initial period of ambiguity in which the semantics of some was compatible with both characters. This ambiguity could be immediately resolved by a pragmatic implicature which would restrict some to a proper subset. Instead in Experiments 1 and 2, we found that participants were substantially delayed, suggesting a lag between semantic and pragmatic processing. In Experiment 3, we examined interpretations of some when competitors were inconsistent with the semantics (girl with socks vs. girl with no socks). We found quick resolution of the target, suggesting that previous delays were specifically linked to pragmatic analysis.
数量隐含一直是探索语言理解过程中语义和语用过程之间关系的一个测试案例。大多数研究使用反应时间方法，结果各不相同。在这些研究中，我们使用视觉世界范式来研究隐含。我们记录了参与者在诸如“指向有一些袜子的女孩”这样的指令下的眼动情况，当时的展示中有一个女孩有四双袜子中的两双，另一个女孩有三个足球。这些话语最初存在歧义期，其中“一些”的语义与两个角色都相符。这种歧义可以通过语用隐含立即得到解决，即将“一些”限制为一个恰当的子集。然而在实验1和实验2中，我们发现参与者有显著延迟，这表明语义和语用处理之间存在滞后。在实验3中，我们研究了在竞争者与语义不一致（有袜子的女孩与没有袜子的女孩）时对“一些”的解释。我们发现目标能快速得到解决，这表明之前的延迟与语用分析有特定关联。
