Department of Psychology

Time course of presupposition processing

Funded by the "Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft" (DFG; German Research Foundation) within the collaborative research center 833 (Sonderforschungsbereich, SFB 833) as Project B2

Cooperation project with Prof. Dr. Gerhard Jäger and PD Dr. Michael Franke (both Institute of Linguistics)

The project is concerned with the question how presuppositional information is processed during the online construction of a sentence’s meaning. Building on earlier results, we propose a model of pragmatic presupposition processing in which listeners expect speakers to make pragmatically felicitous utterances and use these expectations to incrementally and predictively process incoming material. We propose to link violations of such expectations to empirical data from mouse-tracking experiments among others. Mouse tracking is an established tool in cognitive psychology that delivers fine-grained data about the temporal unfolding of a decision process.

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Publications:

Schneider, C., Schonard, C., Franke, M., Jäger, G., & Janczyk, M. (accepted/in press). Pragmatic processing: An investigation of the (anti-)presupposition of determiners using mouse-tracking. Cognition.