Schneider Cosima, Bade Nadine, Janczyk Markus
Department of Psychology, University of Tübingen, Schleichstraße 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
Department of Cognitive Studies, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2020 Apr;49(2):247-273. doi: 10.1007/s10936-019-09686-3.
Informally speaking, presuppositions are meaning components which are part of the common ground for speakers in a conversation, that is, background information which is taken for granted by interlocutors. The current literature suggests an immediate processing of presuppositions, starting directly on the word triggering the presupposition. In the present paper, we focused on two presupposition triggers in German, the definite determiner the (German der) and the iterative particle again (German wieder). Experiment 1 replicates the immediate effects which were previously observed in a self-paced reading study. Experiment 2 then investigates whether this immediate processing of presuppositions is automatic or capacity-limited by employing the psychological refractory period approach and the locus of slack-logic, which have been successfully employed for this reason in various fields of cognitive psychology. The results argue against automatic processing, but rather suggest that the immediate processing of presuppositions is capacity-limited. This potentially helps specifying the nature of the involved processes; for example, a memory search for a potential referent.
通俗地讲，预设是意义成分，是对话中说话者共同背景的一部分，也就是说，是对话者视为理所当然的背景信息。当前的文献表明，预设会被立即处理，直接从触发预设的词开始。在本文中，我们聚焦于德语中的两个预设触发词，定冠词the（德语der）和迭代词again（德语wieder）。实验1重复了之前在一项自定步速阅读研究中观察到的即时效应。然后，实验2通过采用心理不应期方法和松弛逻辑点来研究这种对预设的即时处理是自动的还是受容量限制的，由于这个原因，这些方法已在认知心理学的各个领域中成功应用。结果反对自动处理，而是表明对预设的即时处理是受容量限制的。这可能有助于明确所涉及过程的性质；例如，对潜在所指对象的记忆搜索。
