Lyu Siqi, Wang Luming
Institute of Psychology, University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia.
College of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang University of Technology, Hangzhou, China.
Front Psychol. 2022 May 10;13:866103. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.866103. eCollection 2022.
Interpersonal verbs like and in bias the potential cause of the event to one of the antecedent noun phrases (henceforth NPs) (e.g., Lucy for whereas Mary for ). Using Chinese as its materials, this study investigated how verb-based implicit causality affects online pronoun resolution in backward concession (e.g., ), an intersubjective discourse relation where the subordinate -clause forms an indirect relationship with the preceding main clause. Experiment 1 was a baseline experiment with the typical structure where implicit causality is found to be effective, i.e., backward causality. Results showed a clear modulation effect of implicit causality on pronoun resolution such that as verb bias strength decreases, participants were faster in processing sentences that disambiguate the pronoun to the verb-inconsistent NP. However, this modulation effect was not observed in Experiment 2 where we used the same verbs but replaced with . There was no preference for the pronoun to be disambiguated toward the verb-consistent NP or the verb-inconsistent NP in backward concession. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 were replicated in Experiment 3 where we directly compared causal and concessive relations. We suggest that the absent effect of verb-based implicit causality in backward concession could be attributed to the intersubjective nature of the concessive relation. Discourse devices such as indicate speakers' subjective perspective and comprehenders are able to quickly accommodate the speaker's point of view during online discourse processing.
像“accuse”和“blame”这样的人际动词会将事件的潜在原因偏向于先行名词短语（以下简称NP）之一（例如，“accuse”偏向露西，而“blame”偏向玛丽）。本研究以中文为材料，调查了基于动词的隐含因果关系如何影响逆向让步（例如“Although Lucy accused Mary, she was actually the one who did it”）中的在线代词消解，逆向让步是一种主体间话语关系，其中从属子句与前面的主句形成间接关系。实验1是一个具有典型结构的基线实验，在该结构中发现隐含因果关系是有效的，即逆向因果关系。结果显示隐含因果关系对代词消解有明显的调节作用，即随着动词偏向强度的降低，参与者在处理将代词消解为与动词不一致的NP的句子时速度更快。然而，在实验2中没有观察到这种调节作用，在实验2中我们使用了相同的动词，但将“accuse”替换为“blame”。在逆向让步中，代词没有偏向于与动词一致的NP或与动词不一致的NP的偏好。实验1和2的结果在实验3中得到了重复，在实验3中我们直接比较了因果关系和让步关系。我们认为，基于动词的隐含因果关系在逆向让步中不存在效应可能归因于让步关系的主体间性质。像“although”这样的话语手段表明了说话者的主观视角，并且理解者在在线话语处理过程中能够快速接受说话者的观点。
