Understanding Counterfactuals in Transparent and Nontransparent Context: An Event-Related Potential Investigation
Understanding Counterfactuals in Transparent and Nontransparent Context: An Event-Related Potential Investigation
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DOI：
10.1037/xlm0000985
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发表时间：
2021-08-01
影响因子：
2.6
通讯作者：
Xu, Xiaodong
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Dai, Haoyun;Kaan, Edith;Xu, Xiaodong
反事实描述了人们知道是错误的现实的想象替代品。因此，成功的反事实理解需要人们同时记住想象的假设世界和预设的真实的世界。反事实透明度，也就是说，在何种程度上，一个上下文可以很容易地确定反事实，可能会影响语义处理。对于像中文这样缺乏专门的反事实标记的语言来说，情况可能尤其如此，因此更依赖于上下文。本研究采用事件相关电位技术考察了反事实透明度对汉语反事实理解的影响。对于透明上下文（例如，“如果世界上的一切都能回到过去。. .在信息高度可及的情况下，话语不一致词诱发了P600效应。相反，对于非透明上下文（例如，“如果当时做好准备的话。. .）中，读者必须注意特定的语篇语境，并结合语用信息来达到反事实解释，语篇不一致会产生N400效应。这些发现表明：（a）提供了一个约束性的语境，语义加工不会被反事实的双重性质所破坏（即，读者可以快速地做出上下文适当的推断来解释随后的叙述）和（B）反事实的透明度可以影响随后的语义处理的性质。我们的研究结果支持了基于使用的观点，即汉语反事实理解是高度依赖于语境和语用驱动的。
Counterfactuals describe imagined alternatives to reality that people know to be false. Successful counterfactual comprehension therefore requires people to keep in mind both an imagined hypothetical world and the presupposed real world. Counterfactual transparency, that is, the degree to which a context makes it easy to determine counterfactuality, might affect semantic processing. This might especially be the case for languages like Chinese which lack dedicated counterfactual markers and therefore are more context-dependent. Using event-related potentials, this study investigates the role of counterfactual transparency on the comprehension of Chinese counterfactuals. For transparent contexts (e.g., "If everything in the world could go back in time . . ."), in which the information needed to identify counterfactuality is highly accessible, discourse incongruent words elicited P600 effects. In contrast, for nontransparent contexts (e.g., "If better preparations were made at that time . . .") in which readers must attend to specific discourse context and engage pragmatic information to arrive at the counterfactual interpretation, discourse incongruencies gave rise to N400 effects. These findings suggest that (a) provided a constraining context, semantic processing is not disrupted by the dual nature of counterfactuality (i.e., readers can rapidly make contextually appropriate inferences to interpret subsequent narratives) and (b) the degree of transparency of the counterfactual can affect the nature of subsequent semantic processing. Our findings support the usage-based view that Chinese counterfactual comprehension is highly context-dependent and pragmatics-driven.