Dieussaert Kristien, Verkerk Suzanne, Gillard Ellen, Schaeken Walter
Psychology Department, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2011 Dec;64(12):2352-67. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2011.588799. Epub 2011 Sep 7.
Under the assumption of the principle of cooperation (Grice, 1989), a statement such as "some eels are fish" is thought to be false since it contains less information than is considered sufficient. However, the statement is logically sound since the meaning of "some" is compatible with "all". Currently, the primary interpretation of such underinformative statements remains subject to debate. According to Levinson (2000), the pragmatic "some but not all" interpretation is the default interpretation, while others (e.g., Sperber & Wilson, 1995) argue that this pragmatic interpretation only comes to the fore when relevant within the context and is thus considered secondary to the logical "some and perhaps all" interpretation. In this study, three factors that may influence the answer pattern are studied: task load, working memory capacity, and repetition of the statements. In Experiment 1, we used a secondary task paradigm to manipulate the cognitive load under which a number of underinformative statements had to be judged. We observed that for participants with a rather limited working memory span it is harder to reach a pragmatic interpretation under cognitive load. In Experiment 2, we manipulated the repetition of the statements. We observed that with a higher number of filler statements, participants produced fewer consistent answer patterns. This study provides further evidence against the automaticity of the pragmatic interpretation: It shows that the pragmatic interpretation requires more cognitive effort than the logical interpretation and that increasing the number of filler statements inhibits the development of a response strategy.
在合作原则（格赖斯，1989）的假设下，像“有些鳗鱼是鱼”这样的陈述被认为是错误的，因为它包含的信息比人们认为足够的信息要少。然而，该陈述在逻辑上是合理的，因为“有些”的含义与“所有”是兼容的。目前，这种信息不足陈述的主要解释仍存在争议。根据列文森（2000）的观点，语用学上“有些但并非全部”的解释是默认解释，而其他人（如斯珀伯和威尔逊，1995）则认为，这种语用解释只有在语境中相关时才会凸显出来，因此被认为次于逻辑上“有些且可能全部”的解释。在本研究中，我们研究了可能影响答案模式的三个因素：任务负荷、工作记忆容量和陈述的重复。在实验1中，我们使用了次要任务范式来操纵认知负荷，在这种负荷下，需要对一些信息不足的陈述进行判断。我们观察到，对于工作记忆跨度相当有限的参与者来说，在认知负荷下更难达成语用解释。在实验2中，我们操纵了陈述的重复。我们观察到，填充陈述数量越多，参与者产生的一致答案模式就越少。这项研究提供了进一步的证据来反驳语用解释的自动性：它表明，语用解释比逻辑解释需要更多的认知努力，并且增加填充陈述的数量会抑制反应策略的发展。
