Using the visual-world paradigm to explore the meaning of conditionals in natural language

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Conditionals
• conjunctions
• visual world paradigm
• hypothetical thinking
• Mandarin Chinese

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.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 15YBB29] and [grant number 15YJ050003] to Likan Zhan and by Tsinghua University Initiative Scientific Research Program [grant number 2016THZWLJ14] to Peng Zhou.