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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...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Public Library of Science
2015
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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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4619717 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2015 |
publisher | Public Library of Science |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
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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