Abstract
We report two experiments that investigate the time-course of the online interpretation of the presupposition of also, first relative to a control, and secondly relative to asserted content, namely the exclusivity of only, using the visual world paradigm. Both studies reveal rapid shifts in fixations to target pictures based on the presupposition expressed by also, after 200–300 ms after its onset. In contrast, the asserted exclusivity introduced by only arises roughly 400 ms later, suggesting that—if anything—presupposed content is evaluated prior to asserted content. This is as expected on semantic accounts of presuppositions, which see them as preconditions on interpreting the sentence in the first place, but somewhat surprising (though not necessarily strictly inconsistent) with pragmatic accounts that derive presuppositions via conversational reasoning, which has been found to require additional processing time in the case of scalar implicature computation.
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Notes
- 1.
For other recent studies on presuppositions using the visual world paradigm, see Kim’s and Romoli et al.’s contributions in this volume, as well as Romoli et al. 2013.
- 2.
The Intercept can be interpreted in this way because the Critical condition was used as the reference level.
- 3.
Unstressed also in the pre-copula position was found to be non-optimal in a pilot study for Experiment 1.
- 4.
Note also that when looking at target proportions (not relativized to looks to the competitor), the interaction already becomes significant in the 300–400 ms time window.
- 5.
Click times were also faster in the Critical condition for also, but given the different length in the target sentences between conditions here, this is not straightforwardly interpretable.
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Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Robert Wilder for essential help with implementation of the design, data collection, and data treatment. Many thanks also to Dorothy Ahn for creating the visual stimuli, as well as for assistance with data collection. Part of the work reported here was supported by a grant from the University Research Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania.
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Schwarz, F. (2015). Presuppositions vs. Asserted Content in Online Processing. In: Schwarz, F. (eds) Experimental Perspectives on Presuppositions. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 45. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07980-6_4
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