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Context Breeds False Memories for Indeterminate Sentences

What are the roles of semantic and pragmatic processes in the interpretation of sentences in context? And how do we attain such interpretations when sentences are deemed indeterminate? Consider a sentence such as “Lisa began the book” which does not overtly express the activity that Lisa began doing...

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Autores principales: Riven, Levi, de Almeida, Roberto G.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Frontiers Media S.A. 2021
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7994259/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33776841
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.616065
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author Riven, Levi
de Almeida, Roberto G.
author_facet Riven, Levi
de Almeida, Roberto G.
author_sort Riven, Levi
collection PubMed
description What are the roles of semantic and pragmatic processes in the interpretation of sentences in context? And how do we attain such interpretations when sentences are deemed indeterminate? Consider a sentence such as “Lisa began the book” which does not overtly express the activity that Lisa began doing with the book. Although it is believed that individuals compute a specified event to enrich the sentential representation – yielding, e.g., “began [reading] the book” – there is no evidence that a default event meaning is attained. Moreover, if indeterminate sentences are enriched, it is not clear where the information required to generate enriched interpretations come from. Experiment 1 showed that, in isolation, there is no default interpretation for indeterminate sentences. The experiment also showed that biasing contexts constrain event interpretations and improve plausibility judgments, suggesting that event representations for indeterminate sentences are generated by context. In Experiment 2, participants heard biasing discourse contexts and later falsely recognized foil sentences containing the biased events (“Lisa began reading the book”) at the same proportion and with the same confidence as the original indeterminate sentence (“Lisa began the book”). We suggest that indeterminate sentences trigger event-enriching inferences but only in sufficiently constraining contexts. We also suggest that indeterminate sentences create two memory traces, one for the proposition consistent with the denotational, compositional meaning, and another for the proposition that is enriched pragmatically over time.
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spelling pubmed-79942592021-03-27 Context Breeds False Memories for Indeterminate Sentences Riven, Levi de Almeida, Roberto G. Front Psychol Psychology What are the roles of semantic and pragmatic processes in the interpretation of sentences in context? And how do we attain such interpretations when sentences are deemed indeterminate? Consider a sentence such as “Lisa began the book” which does not overtly express the activity that Lisa began doing with the book. Although it is believed that individuals compute a specified event to enrich the sentential representation – yielding, e.g., “began [reading] the book” – there is no evidence that a default event meaning is attained. Moreover, if indeterminate sentences are enriched, it is not clear where the information required to generate enriched interpretations come from. Experiment 1 showed that, in isolation, there is no default interpretation for indeterminate sentences. The experiment also showed that biasing contexts constrain event interpretations and improve plausibility judgments, suggesting that event representations for indeterminate sentences are generated by context. In Experiment 2, participants heard biasing discourse contexts and later falsely recognized foil sentences containing the biased events (“Lisa began reading the book”) at the same proportion and with the same confidence as the original indeterminate sentence (“Lisa began the book”). We suggest that indeterminate sentences trigger event-enriching inferences but only in sufficiently constraining contexts. We also suggest that indeterminate sentences create two memory traces, one for the proposition consistent with the denotational, compositional meaning, and another for the proposition that is enriched pragmatically over time. Frontiers Media S.A. 2021-03-12 /pmc/articles/PMC7994259/ /pubmed/33776841 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.616065 Text en Copyright © 2021 Riven and de Almeida. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
spellingShingle Psychology
Riven, Levi
de Almeida, Roberto G.
Context Breeds False Memories for Indeterminate Sentences
title Context Breeds False Memories for Indeterminate Sentences
title_full Context Breeds False Memories for Indeterminate Sentences
title_fullStr Context Breeds False Memories for Indeterminate Sentences
title_full_unstemmed Context Breeds False Memories for Indeterminate Sentences
title_short Context Breeds False Memories for Indeterminate Sentences
title_sort context breeds false memories for indeterminate sentences
topic Psychology
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7994259/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33776841
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.616065
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