Pragmatic skills predict online counterfactual comprehension: Evidence from the N400.

ABSTRACT: Counterfactual thought allows people to consider alternative worlds they know to be false. Communicating these thoughts through language poses a social-communicative challenge because listeners typically expect a speaker to produce true utterances, but counterfactuals per definition convey information that is false. Listeners must therefore incorporate overt linguistic cues (subjunctive mood, such as in If I loved you then) in a rapid way to infer the intended counterfactual meaning. The present EEG study focused on the comprehension of such counterfactual antecedents and investigated if pragmatic ability-the ability to apply knowledge of the social-communicative use of language in daily life-predicts the online generation of counterfactual worlds. This yielded two novel findings: (1) Word

SUBMITTER: Kulakova E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5018041 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature