Overcoming perceptual features in logical reasoning: an event-related potentials study

It is more difficult for reasoners to detect that the letter-number pair H7 verifies the conditional rule If there is not a T then there is not a 4 than to detect that it verifies the rule If there is an H then there is a 7. In prior work [Prado, J., & Noveck, I. A. (2007). Overcoming perceptual features in logical reasoning: a parametric functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 19(4), 642-657], we argued that this difficulty was due to mismatching effects, i.e. perceptual mismatches that arise when the items mentioned in the rule (e.g. T and 4) mismatch those presented in the test-pair (H and 7). The present study aimed to test this claim directly by recording ERPs while participants evaluated conditional rules in the presence or absence of mismatches. We found that mismatches, not only trigger a frontocentral N2 (an ERP known to be related to perceptual mismatch) but that they, parametrically modulate its amplitude (e.g. two mismatches prompt a greater N2 than one). Our results indicate that the main role of negations in conditional rules is to focus attention on the negated constituent but also suggest that there is some inter-individual differences in the way participants apprehend such negations, as indicated by a correlation between N2 amplitude and participants' reaction times. Overall, these findings emphasize how overcoming perceptual features plays a role in the mismatching effect and extend the mismatch-related effects of the N2 into a reasoning task

Experimental Pragmatics

International audienceThis chapter describes some of the important research in experimental pragmatics, most notably studies related to recovering speakers’ intentions, inferring conversational implicatures, and the role of common ground in discourse understanding. My aim is to demonstrate the utility of different experimental methods for studying pragmatics, and how research findings in the field are relevant to traditional concerns within the linguistic pragmatics community. But I will also argue that experimental pragmatic studies show great regularities and significant variation, both within and across individuals, in the ways people speak and understand language. My alternative view claims that dynamical, self-organizing processes form the critical background from which meaningful pragmatic actions emerge. The implications of this position for interdisciplinary pragmatic research will be discussed

Le raisonnement et la pragmatique

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Experimental Pragmatics: The making of a cognitive science

International audienceHow does a listener understand a sarcastic 'That was a wonderful speech' when the words point to a positive review? Why do students of introductory logic interpret 'Some cabs are yellow' as 'Not all cabs are yellow' when the meaning of 'some' is compatible with 'all'? Pragmatics aims to explain how listeners draw out a speaker's meaning from utterances, an astonishing feat when one considers that the words in a sentence hardly suffice for fully comprehending what the speaker intended. Given the nature of pragmatics, it is going to take the interdisciplinary firepower of many cognitive sciences - including philosophy, experimental psychology, linguistics and neuroscience - to fully appreciate this uniquely human ability. In this book, Ira Noveck, a leading pioneer in experimental pragmatics, engagingly walks the reader through the phenomena, the theoretical debates, the experiments as well as the historical development of this growing academic discipline