Neural correlates of fine‐grained meaning distinctions: An fMRI investigation of scalar quantifiers

Abstract

Communication involves successfully deriving a speaker's meaning beyond the literal expression. Using fMRI, it was investigated how the listener's brain realizes distinctions between enrichment-based meanings and literal semantic meanings. The neural patterns of the Mandarin scalar quantifier you-de (similar to some in English) which implies the meanings not all and not most via scalar enrichment, with the specific quantifier shao-shu-de (similar to less than half in English) which lexico-semantically encodes the meanings not all and not most, were compared. Listeners heard sentences using either quantifier, paired with pictures in which either less than half, more than half, or all of the people depicted in the picture were doing the described activity; thus, the conditions included both implicature-based and semantics-based picture-sentence mismatches. Imaging results showed bilateral ventral IFG was activated for both kinds of mismatch, whereas basal ganglia and left dorsal IFG were activated uniquely for implicature-based mismatch. These findings suggest that resolving conflicts involving inferential aspects of meaning employs different neural mechanisms than the processing based on literal semantic meaning, and that the dorsal prefrontal/basal ganglia pathway makes a contribution to implicature-based interpretation. Furthermore, within the implicature-based conditions, different neural generators were implicated in the processing of strong implicature mismatch (you-de in the context of a picture in which "all" would have been true) and weak implicature mismatch (you-de in the context of a picture in which "most" would have been true), which may have important implications for theories of pragmatic comprehension. Hum Brain Mapp 38:3848-3864, 2017. © 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Gricean Expectations in Online Sentence Comprehension: An ERP Study on the Processing of Scalar Inferences

“…Therefore, this study uses declarative clauses and tests whether ERPs at several sentence positions can be explained in terms of comprehenders’ expectations of incoming lexical material. By comparing previous results from the quantifier all with the present results from the quantifier some , the current study also adds to recent considerations about the on‐line processing of semantic and pragmatic aspects of quantificational meaning (Zhan, Jiang, Politzer‐Ahles, & Zhou, ).…”

What can electrophysiology tell us about the cognitive processing of scalar implicatures?

“…Such findings have been taken as evidence that pragmatic and semantic processing engender qualitatively different brain responses, a claim which has also drawn support from haemodynamic brain imaging research that has found activation in different brain regions for putatively pragmatic versus semantic violations in a similar paradigm (Shetreet, Chierchia, & Gaab, 2014a,b,c;Zhan, Jiang, Politzer-Ahles, & Zhou, 2017). Such a dissociation would be theoretically important, given that it is an open question whether scalar implicatures are derived by pragmatic and semantic mechanisms, as discussed above.…”

Linguistic signs in action: The neuropragmatics of speech acts

“…These processes have long been researched in philosophy and linguistics, but only in recent decades has it become a field of research in neuroscience known as “Neuropragmatics” ( Bambini et al, 2011 , Bara et al, 1997 , Cutica et al, 2006 , Gambi et al, 2015 , Hagoort and Levinson, 2014 , Levinson, 2016 , Noveck, 2018 , Sauerland and Schumacher, 2016 , Soroker et al, 2005 ). Substantial linguistic and neurocognitive research has focused on cases where pragmatic processing is most pronounced, that is, in non-literal meanings, including indirect speech, metaphors, irony and humour ( Bambini et al, 2011 , Bambini et al, 2019 , Boux et al, 2022 , Canal and Bambini, 2020 , Coulson, 2008 , Eviatar and Just, 2006 ), on the study of Gricean conversational implicatures ( Benz and Gotzner, 2021 , Degen and Tanenhaus, 2011 , Feng et al, 2021 , Gotzner et al, 2018 , Hartshorne et al, 2015 , Noveck and Posada, 2003 , Zhan et al, 2017 ) or addressing social and pragmatic deficits in various clinical populations ( Bambini et al, 2022 , Baron-Cohen, 1988 , Carotenuto et al, 2018 , Deliens et al, 2018 , Holtgraves and Giordano, 2017 , Soroker et al, 2005 ). Further research has focused on the organisation and structure of conversations, which have yielded important insights on how human social interactions are organised in sequences (e.g., Kendrick et al, 2020 , Levinson, 2013 , Schegloff, 2007 ), where linguistic signs (words and sentences along with non-verbal communication, such as gestures) are used as a tool of communication to carry out linguistic actions, the so-called speech acts.…”