Incremental generation of answers during the comprehension of questions with quantifiers

• Published in: Cognition Vol. 166; pp. 328 - 343
• Main Authors: Bott, Oliver, Augurzky, Petra, Sternefeld, Wolfgang, Ulrich, Rolf
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Netherlands Elsevier B.V 01.09.2017; Elsevier Science Ltd
• Subjects: Answer preparation; Answers; Cognition & reasoning; Context integration; Incrementality; Priming; Probe RT task; Quantifier interpretation; Quantifier restriction; Reaction time; Reaction time task; Risk assessment; Visual task performance; Probe RT task; Quantifier restriction; Context integration; Incrementality; Answer preparation; Quantifier interpretation
• ISSN: 0010-0277; 1873-7838
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.05.023

The paper presents a study on the online interpretation of quantified questions involving complex domain restriction, for instance, are all triangles blue that are in the circle. Two probe reaction time (RT) task experiments were conducted to study the incremental nature of answer generation while manipulating visual contexts and response hand overlap between tasks. We manipulated the contexts in such a way that the incremental answer to the question changed from ‘yes’ to ‘no’ or remained the same before and after encountering the extraposed relative clause. The findings of both experiments provide evidence for incremental answer preparation but only if the context did not involve the risk of answer revision. Our results show that preliminary output from incremental semantic interpretation results in response priming that facilitates congruent responses in the probe RT task.