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Abstract
It is considered underinformative to say Some As are B when it is known that all As are B. Such underinformative sentences receive divergent truth-value judgements: whereas so-called logical responders evaluate them to be true, pragmatic responders reject them as false. In a sentence-picture verification experiment, we found that the split in the behavioural responses correlates with the difference in the event-related potentials (ERP) signal (N400 and P600) recorded for underinformative and for unambiguously true or false sentences with some. However, the ERP patterns for sentences with all are similar for both groups. In contrast to previous findings, the effect is independent of the subjects' autistic spectrum quotients. Assuming that the N400 amplitude is inversely correlated with the expected probability of the critical word we argue that the observed between-group difference in the ERP pattern can be explained by the hypothesis that ‘logicians’ and ‘pragmatists’ use distinct verification strategies in evaluating sentences with the quantifier some.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Natalia Rak for assistance in collecting the data, Napoleon Katsos for helpful comments on the project, finally the anonymous reviewer for useful remarks that helped us improve this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. The icons of the cat and the ball, as featured in Figure , were obtained from www.openclipart.org and are free from any copyright restrictions. This site allows unlimited reproduction of the content for non-commercial use and all images are in the public domain.
Notes
1. The frequency value v of a word w is equal to the log2 of the quotient of the frequency of the word “der” and the frequency of the word w in corpus.
2. In supplementary materials, we provide the list of the noun triples used for the test trials and those used for the fillers as well as the log-frequency values for all the words.
3. As the analysis yields the same significant effects when performed on untransformed data for ease of interpretation, we refer to the untransformed values in Table and Figure .
4. The grand averages and the topoplots of the effects observed in the whole group analysis are available in supplementary materials. We also present there an example graphical visualization of the cluster-based permutation test results as well as the topographical maps of the effects in the comparisons of the S-conditions and A-conditions for each of the groups. Furthermore, for a comparison of the cluster-based statistics with a more traditional approach to data analysis, we also provide a repeated measures ANOVA of the EEG data using pre-defined time-windows. This analysis yields similar results as the reported here cluster-based statistics.
5. In each case, we excluded the EOG electrodes, linked mastoids and those anterior electrodes that were discarded from the analysis in the beginning due to technical problems (AF7, AF8, Fp1, Fp2). For the N400 effects in all comparisons, the involved electrodes included basically the whole scalp, except for the electrode F7 in the comparison SI vs. ST and F7, FT7 in the comparison SF vs. SI. For some of the positivity effects, certain regions were not involved: For the SI vs. ST PNP the non-involved electrodes were F7, F8, FC6, T8, F5, FT7, FT8; for the SF vs. SI PNP: F3, F8, AF3, AF4, F1; whereas the AFN vs. AFP PNP effect had a centro-parietal distribution, i.e. the excluded electrodes were: F7, F3, F4, Fz, F8, FC6, C4, T8, P8, AF3, AF4, F5, F1, F2, F6, FC4, FT8, C6, TP8. The PNP effects in the remaining comparisons involved all electrodes.
6. The EOG electrodes, linked mastoids as well as the anterior electrodes: Fp1, Fp2, Af7, Af8 were excluded.