Inefficient understanding of non-factive mental verbs with social aspect in adults: comparison to cognitive factive verb processing

Abstract

Introduction

Mental verbs denote inner mental states and are an important link between language and Theory of Mind ability conceptualized as mental state understanding. Non-factive mental verbs denote an obligation or intention and constitute a discrete class of mental verbs which are characterized by their social aspect. This study aimed to examine adults’ ability to understand non-factive mental verbs with the social aspect as compared to cognitive factive mental verbs which denote a true event.

Methods

A total of 94 participants, aged 18–95 years, were examined using two tasks measuring non-factive and factive verb processing, respectively, and a working memory test.

Results

The results indicated that non-factive verbs process is at a significantly lower level than those of cognitive factives.

Conclusion

The inspection of the way adapted to process the non-factive verbs denoting obligation or intention, as well as the confirmation of a unifactorial structure of the task developed to measure non-factives’ processing, showed that adults have a common pattern of non-factive mental verb understanding, which is based on heuristic ways of thinking and is not affected by working memory capacity and age.

Keywords:

• affirmation/negation
• cognitive factive mental verbs
• heuristic ways of thinking
• non-factive mental verbs
• verbs denoting obligation or intention

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Research Committee of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece (Special Account for Research Implementation/87871/Moraitou). The funding source had no other involvement besides financial support in the conduct of the research and the preparation of the article.

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.