Jasbi Masoud, Waldon Brandon, Degen Judith
Department of Linguistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, United States.
Department of Linguistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States.
Front Psychol. 2019 Feb 12;10:189. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00189. eCollection 2019.
The past 15 years have seen increasing experimental investigations of core pragmatic questions in the ever more active and lively field of experimental pragmatics. Within experimental pragmatics, many of the core questions have relied on the operationalization of the theoretical notion of "implicature rate." Implicature rate based results have informed the work on acquisition, online processing, and scalar diversity, inter alia. Implicature rate has typically been quantified as the proportion of "pragmatic" judgments in two-alternative forced choice truth value judgment tasks. Despite its theoretical importance, this linking hypothesis from implicature rate to behavioral responses has never been extensively tested. Here we show that two factors dramatically affect the "implicature rate" inferred from truth value judgment tasks: (a) the number of responses provided to participants; and (b) the linking hypothesis about what constitutes a "pragmatic" judgment. We argue that it is time for the field of experimental pragmatics to engage more seriously with its foundational assumptions about how theoretical notions map onto behaviorally measurable quantities, and present a sketch of an alternative linking hypothesis that derives behavior in truth value judgment tasks from probabilistic utterance expectations.
在日益活跃和充满活力的实验语用学领域，过去15年中对核心语用问题的实验研究不断增加。在实验语用学中，许多核心问题都依赖于“含义率”这一理论概念的操作化。基于含义率的结果尤其为语言习得、在线加工和量级多样性等方面的研究提供了信息。含义率通常被量化为二选一强制选择真值判断任务中“语用”判断的比例。尽管其在理论上很重要，但从含义率到行为反应的这一关联假设从未得到过广泛检验。在此我们表明，有两个因素会极大地影响从真值判断任务中推断出的“含义率”：（a）向参与者提供的反应数量；以及（b）关于什么构成“语用”判断的关联假设。我们认为，实验语用学领域是时候更认真地审视其关于理论概念如何映射到行为可测量量的基本假设了，并提出了一个替代关联假设的梗概，该假设从概率性话语期望中推导真值判断任务中的行为。
