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Do pragmatic abilities modulate language processing? Exploring the effect of pragmatic abilities on NPI licensing in English.
Poster Session B, Friday, September 12, 4:30 - 6:00 pm, Field House
This poster is part of the Sandbox Series.
Grace deMeurisse1,2, Edith Kaan1; 1University of Florida, 2Bard College
Among neurotypical and neurodivergent populations alike, individuals may possess traits associated with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which may be modulatory of language processing (e.g., Nieuwland et al., 2010; Xiang et al. (2013)). Xiang et al. (2013) observed that participants’ scores on the communication subscale of the Autism Spectrum Quotient (ASQ; Baron-Cohen et al., 2001) modulated processing of complex constructions containing negative polarity items (NPIs) in an acceptability judgement task. NPIs are items that must appear only in negative or “non-positive” contexts (e.g., Giannakidou, 2006). NPIs are exemplified by the word “ever” in sentences (1) and (2) below: (1) No young athletes have everNPI won the regional marathon (2) Only young athletes have everNPI won the regional marathon (3) *Most young athletes have everNPI won the regional marathon. Sentences (1) and (2) are grammatical given the presence of negation. In (1), negation is overt, given the negative operator “no”. In (2), negation is introduced via negative implicature, “young athletes and no others have ever…” which implicates an additional pragmatic computation, given implicature is pragmatic in nature. These sentences can be contrasted with (3) which is ungrammatical, because the quantifier “most” is positive. To current knowledge, no study has investigated the effect of “pragmatic competency” – as indexed by the communication subscale of the ASQ – using simple sentences containing NPIs, or using ERP methodology. We conducted three studies which investigated the effect of pragmatic competency and individual licensing environment (e.g., negative environment, “no vs. only”) on NPI processing in English. We utilized a grammaticality judgment task (GJT) (n=168), a self-paced reading task (SPR; n=180), and an ERP experiment (n=21; data collection ongoing). We investigated the effect of pragmatic abilities on individuals’ processing of NPIs under two different negative contexts (overt negation as in (1) vs. negative implicature as in (2)). No effects of pragmatic abilities were observed in our offline experiment. In our SPR task, collapsed over language groups, we observed overall faster reading times (RT) on the critical word (CW) “ever” as pragmatic abilities decrease (ASQ score becomes higher; b=-0.02, SE=0.01, t=-2.3, p<0.05). This was also the case for the word following “ever” (b=-0.02, SE=0.01, t=-2.57, p<0.05). Preliminary analyses of the ERP data suggest that the overall P600 amplitude (600-800ms time-window) at the word “ever” decreased with decreasing pragmatic abilities (increasing ASQ Score) (b=-0.24, SE=0.10, t=-2.3, p<0.05). A Grammaticality by ASQ score interaction approached significance on the second word following the CW “ever” (b=0.39, SE=0.21, t=1.80, p=0.07): as pragmatic abilities decrease (ASQ score increases), the amplitude difference between grammatical and ungrammatical conditions increases. Our SPR results suggest that pragmatic abilities may modulate language processing in general, given the main effect of ASQ score on RT. However, no interaction effects were observed in our SPR task. Our preliminary ERP results suggest that pragmatic abilities may be modulatory of semantic-pragmatic processing more specifically, given the nearly-significant interaction between ASQ score and grammaticality; data collection is ongoing.
Topic Areas: Meaning: Discourse and Pragmatics, Syntax and Combinatorial Semantics