Wei Yipu, Knoeferle Pia
School of Chinese as a Second Language, Peking University, Beijing, China.
Department of German Studies and Linguistics, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
Front Psychol. 2023 Sep 18;14:1172928. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1172928. eCollection 2023.
Events are not isolated but rather linked to one another in various dimensions. In language processing, various sources of information-including real-world knowledge, (representations of) current linguistic input and non-linguistic visual context-help establish causal connections between events. In this review, we discuss causal inference in relation to events and event knowledge as one aspect of world knowledge, and their representations in language comprehension. To evaluate the mechanism and time course of causal inference, we gather insights from studies on (1) implicit causality/consequentiality as a specific form of causal inference regarding the protagonists of cause/consequence events, and (2) the processing of causal relations. We highlight the importance of methodology in measuring causal inference, compare the results from different research methods, and emphasize the contribution of the visual-world paradigm to achieve a better understanding of causal inference. We recommend that further investigations of causal inference consider temporally sensitive measures and more detailed contexts.
事件并非孤立存在，而是在各个维度上相互关联。在语言处理中，各种信息来源——包括现实世界知识、当前语言输入的（表征）和非语言视觉语境——有助于在事件之间建立因果联系。在本综述中，我们将讨论与事件和事件知识相关的因果推理，将其作为世界知识的一个方面，以及它们在语言理解中的表征。为了评估因果推理的机制和时间进程，我们从以下研究中获取见解：（1）隐式因果关系/结果性，作为关于因果/结果事件主角的因果推理的一种特定形式；（2）因果关系的处理。我们强调测量因果推理时方法的重要性，比较不同研究方法的结果，并强调视觉世界范式对更好理解因果推理的贡献。我们建议，对因果推理的进一步研究应考虑时间敏感的测量方法和更详细的语境。
