Comprehension of non-conventional indirect requests: An event-related brain potential study
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were used to examine the realtime processing of non-conventional indirect requests and literal statement control stimuli in 20 healthy adults. Participants read short story scenarios ending in a 7-word target utterance that could be interpreted either literally, as a statement, or non-literally, as an indirect request, depending on the prior discourse contexts. For example, in a story about a couple in a restaurant, My soup is too cold to eat serves a literal statement about the temperature of the soup when said by a woman to her husband, but serves as an indirect request when the woman makes the same statement to her waiter. Differences in ERPs to literal statements and indirect requests emerged at the second and third words of target sentences, suggesting memory retrieval demands were greater for indirect requests. ERPs to the fifth word of target sentences also differed, as this was the point at which the exact nature of the request was evident to readers. Over-sentence ERPs revealed a low frequency positivity that was larger for indirect requests, suggesting that the construction of the situation model was easier for requests than for literal statements. Results support the claim that pragmatic cues have an early influence on sentence processing, and that prior models of figurative language processing, such as those derived from the Standard Pragmatic Model, are insufficient to describe indirect request processing. The data of the current study support a model in which the literal meaning of an utterance is understood in both conditions, but that when the utterance is meant as an indirect request, transient processing costs occur as language users exploit pragmatic cues such as discourse context, world-knowledge of social conventions, and speaker status.
Authors: Seana Coulson, Christopher Lovett
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2187461950