A perspective-free interpretation of negation

Edmundo Kronmüller (1) , Ira A Noveck (2) , Mohammed Ikram Krarzia (2) , Rawan Charafeddine (2)

1 EPUC - Escuela de Psicología [Santiago de Chile]
2 L2C2 - Laboratoire sur le langage, le cerveau et la cognition

This study investigates the time-course of perspective taking during reference resolution (Keysar et al. 2000; Hanna et al., 2003; Barr, 2008), but here, instead of an utterance containing a direct reference to an object (e.g. "click on the upside-down funnel"), speakers refer to objects using an utterance containing a negation (e.g."click on the one that is not the shiny cylinder"). Because listeners hear a negation, the process of recognizing the intended referent is free from the influence of bottom-up processes that can bias the interpretation toward one referent in the domain, like priming or some other automatic activation of speaker-specific word representations. These bottom-up processes have been proposed as the main mechanisms for early speaker-specific effects in interpreting referential expressions (Brennan & Hanna, 2009; Brown-Schmidt, 2009).

Domaines: Linguistique

Edmundo Kronmüller, Ira A Noveck, Mohammed Ikram Krarzia, Rawan Charafeddine. A perspective-free interpretation of negation. Xprag 2011, Jun 2011, Barcelona, Spain. ⟨hal-00931261⟩