Mirabile Patricia, van Rooij Robert, Schulz Katrin
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2024 Sep 23;15:1363390. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1363390. eCollection 2024.
Generic sentences (e.g., "Dogs bark") express generalizations about groups or individuals. Accounting for the meaning of generic sentences has been proven challenging, and there is still a very lively debate about which factors matter for whether or not we a willing to endorse a particular generic sentence. In this paper we study the effect of on the assertability of generic sentences, where impact refers to the dangerousity of the property the generic is ascribing to a group or individual. We run three preregistered experiments, testing assertability and endorsement of novel generic sentences with visual and textual stimuli. Employing Bayesian statistics we found that impact influences the assertability, and endorsement, of generic statements. However, we observed that the size of the effect impact value may have been previously overestimated by theoretical and experimental works alike. We also run an additional descriptive survey testing standard examples from the linguistic literature and found that at least for some of the examples endorsement appears to be lower than assumed. We end with exploring possible explanations for our results.
类指句（例如，“狗会叫”）表达了关于群体或个体的概括。事实证明，解释类指句的含义具有挑战性，并且对于哪些因素影响我们是否愿意认可某个特定类指句，目前仍存在非常激烈的争论。在本文中，我们研究了[此处缺失关键信息，原文未明确说明研究的具体因素]对类指句可断言性的影响，其中影响是指类指句赋予群体或个体的属性的危险性。我们进行了三项预先注册的实验，使用视觉和文本刺激来测试新颖类指句的可断言性和认可度。采用贝叶斯统计方法，我们发现影响会影响类指陈述的可断言性和认可度。然而，我们观察到，影响值的效应大小可能先前被理论和实验研究都高估了。我们还进行了一项额外的描述性调查，测试了语言学文献中的标准示例，发现至少对于某些示例，认可度似乎低于预期。最后，我们探讨了对我们结果的可能解释。
