ABSTRACT
This paper reports three eye-tracking experiments using the visual world paradigm to explore the meaning of conditionals in Mandarin Chinese. Experiment 1 found that, when all the tokens were actually true in the experimental setting, the conditional connective if … then … didn't elicit significantly more anticipatory fixations than the conjunctive connective … and … on a token that is appropriately to be merged by the sentential connectives. By contrast, Experiments 2 and 3 found that, when a token was designed as hypothetically but not actually true in the experimental setting, the conditional connective elicited significantly more anticipatory fixations than the conjunctive connective on this hypothetical token. The implications of the experimental paradigm and the observed results were then discussed in relation to theories of conditionals, and to models of rationality in general.
Acknowledgements
We thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on an earlier version of the manuscript. We are grateful to Professor Wen Cao for kindly providing the Associated Laboratory of Speechocean Company & College of Chinese Studies at BLCU to conduct the experiments. We also thank Yifan Cao, Meng Wang, Jing Xu, Xiaotong Yang, Min Zhang, and Xuehan Zhou from Beijing Language and Culture University, Yurong Li from Tsinghua University to help to prepare the test stimuli and conduct the experiments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.