University of Tübingen, Schleichstrasse 4, 72076, Tübingen, Germany.
Institut Jean Nicod, Département d'études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, PSL University, CNRS, 29 rue d'Ulm, Paris, France.
Psychol Res. 2021 Apr;85(3):1348-1366. doi: 10.1007/s00426-020-01302-7. Epub 2020 Apr 4.
The present study investigated how listeners understand and process the definite and the indefinite determiner. While the definite determiner clearly conveys a uniqueness presupposition, the status of the anti-uniqueness inference associated with the indefinite determiner is less clear. In a forced choice production task, we observed that participants make use of the information about number usually associated with the two determiners to convey a message. In a subsequent mouse-tracking task, participants had to select one of two potential referents presented on screen according to an auditorily presented stimulus sentence. The data revealed that participants use the information about uniqueness or anti-uniqueness encoded in determiners to disambiguate sentence meaning as early as possible, but only when they are exclusively faced with felicitous uses of determiners.
本研究调查了听者如何理解和处理定冠词和不定冠词。虽然定冠词清楚地传达了一个唯一性预设，但与不定冠词相关的反唯一性推断的地位并不明确。在一项强制选择产生任务中，我们观察到参与者利用通常与这两个限定词相关的数量信息来传达信息。在随后的鼠标跟踪任务中，参与者根据听觉呈现的刺激句子从屏幕上呈现的两个潜在指称物中选择一个。数据显示，参与者使用限定词中编码的关于唯一性或非唯一性的信息来尽早消除句子的歧义，但仅当他们面对限定词的恰当使用时才会这样做。
