Hartshorne Joshua K, Snedeker Jesse, Azar Stephanie Yen-Mun Liem, Kim Albert E
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139 USA.
Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St., Cambridge, MA 02138 USA,
Lang Cogn Neurosci. 2015 Jun 1;30(5):620-634. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2014.981195.
Language comprehension involves not only constructing the literal meaning of a sentence but also going beyond the literal meaning to infer what was meant but not said. One widely-studied test case is scalar implicature: The inference that, e.g., implies she did not eat all of them. Research is mixed on whether this is due to a rote, grammaticalized procedure or instead a complex, contextualized inference. We find that in sentences like If Sally ate some of the cookies, then the rest are on the counter, that triggers a late, sustained positivity relative to Sally ate some of the cookies, and the rest are on the counter. This is consistent with behavioral results and linguistic theory suggesting that the former sentence does not trigger a scalar implicature. This motivates a view on which scalar implicature is contextualized but dependent on grammatical structure.
语言理解不仅涉及构建句子的字面意思，还涉及超越字面意思去推断言外之意。一个被广泛研究的测试案例是等级含义：例如，推断“她吃了一些饼干”意味着她没有把所有饼干都吃掉。关于这是由于机械的、语法化的程序，还是由于复杂的、情境化的推理，研究结果不一。我们发现，在“如果萨利吃了一些饼干，那么其余的在柜台上”这样的句子中，相对于“萨利吃了一些饼干，其余的在柜台上”，“如果……那么……”结构会引发一个较晚出现且持续的正向反应。这与行为结果和语言理论一致，表明前一个句子不会引发等级含义。这支持了一种观点，即等级含义是情境化的，但依赖于语法结构。
