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Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment

Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect...

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Autores principales: Sherrill, Andrew M., Eerland, Anita, Zwaan, Rolf A., Magliano, Joseph P.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2015
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4619717/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26496364
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141181
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author Sherrill, Andrew M.
Eerland, Anita
Zwaan, Rolf A.
Magliano, Joseph P.
author_facet Sherrill, Andrew M.
Eerland, Anita
Zwaan, Rolf A.
Magliano, Joseph P.
author_sort Sherrill, Andrew M.
collection PubMed
description Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments.
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spelling pubmed-46197172015-10-29 Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment Sherrill, Andrew M. Eerland, Anita Zwaan, Rolf A. Magliano, Joseph P. PLoS One Research Article Recent evidence suggests that grammatical aspect can bias how individuals perceive criminal intentionality during discourse comprehension. Given that criminal intentionality is a common criterion for legal definitions (e.g., first-degree murder), the present study explored whether grammatical aspect may also impact legal judgments. In a series of four experiments participants were provided with a legal definition and a description of a crime in which the grammatical aspect of provocation and murder events were manipulated. Participants were asked to make a decision (first- vs. second-degree murder) and then indicate factors that impacted their decision. Findings suggest that legal judgments can be affected by grammatical aspect but the most robust effects were limited to temporal dynamics (i.e., imperfective aspect results in more murder actions than perfective aspect), which may in turn influence other representational systems (i.e., number of murder actions positively predicts perceived intentionality). In addition, findings demonstrate that the influence of grammatical aspect on situation model construction and evaluation is dependent upon the larger linguistic and semantic context. Together, the results suggest grammatical aspect has indirect influences on legal judgments to the extent that variability in aspect changes the features of the situation model that align with criteria for making legal judgments. Public Library of Science 2015-10-23 /pmc/articles/PMC4619717/ /pubmed/26496364 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141181 Text en © 2015 Sherrill et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Sherrill, Andrew M.
Eerland, Anita
Zwaan, Rolf A.
Magliano, Joseph P.
Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment
title Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment
title_full Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment
title_fullStr Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment
title_full_unstemmed Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment
title_short Understanding How Grammatical Aspect Influences Legal Judgment
title_sort understanding how grammatical aspect influences legal judgment
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4619717/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26496364
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0141181
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