Understanding counterfactuals in transparent and nontransparent context: An event-related potential investigation.

Abstract

Counterfactuals describe imagined alternatives to reality that people know to be false. Successful counterfactual comprehension therefore requires people to keep in mind both an imagined hypothetical world and the presupposed real world. Counterfactual transparency, that is, the degree to which a context makes it easy to determine counterfactuality, might affect semantic processing. This might especially be the case for languages like Chinese which lack dedicated counterfactual markers and therefore are more context-dependent. Using event-related potentials, this study investigates the role of counterfactual transparency on the comprehension of Chinese counterfactuals. For transparent contexts (e.g., “If everything in the world could go back in time . . .”), in which the information needed to identify counterfactuality is highly accessible, discourse incongruent words elicited P600 effects. In contrast, for nontransparent contexts (e.g., “If better preparations were made at that time . . .”) in which readers must attend to specific discourse context and engage pragmatic information to arrive at the counterfactual interpretation, discourse incongruencies gave rise to N400 effects. These findings suggest that (a) provided a constraining context, semantic processing is not disrupted by the dual nature of counterfactuality (i.e., readers can rapidly make contextually appropriate inferences to interpret subsequent narratives) and (b) the degree of transparency of the counterfactual can affect the nature of subsequent semantic processing. Our findings support the usage-based view that Chinese counterfactual comprehension is highly context-dependent and pragmatics-driven.

Temporal Shift Length and Antecedent Occurrence Likelihood Modulate Counterfactual Conditional Comprehension: Evidence from Event-Related Potentials

“…[20], Stewart, A.J., et al [21]). Specifically, Dai, H., et al [19] compared the transparent counterfactual context (e.g., If everything in the world could go back in time. .…”

“…We selected two time windows to calculate the mean amplitudes per condition based on the literature on counterfactual sentence processing: 300-500 ms for the N400 (e.g., [19,44]), and 500-800 ms for late positivity (e.g., [45]). Mean ERP amplitudes per participant per condition were fitted with linear mixed effects models (LMEM).…”

“…Previous behavioral testing and corpus studies have shown that yaobushi has been regarded as a reliable predictor of counterfactuals (Hsu, 2014;Jing, 2017;Dai et al, 2019). In particular, Dai (2019) conducted a factuality rating (to ask readers to judge the extent to which the events framed by different conjunctions are interpreted as counterfactual) in sentences led by yinwei (if it had not been for), ruguo (in case of), and yaobushi (if it had not been for) and found only yaobushi conditionals were judged closest to the counterfactual type [19,31,63]. Chinese counterfactuals utilize diverse linguistic devices (e.g., zaozhidao [If I had known earlier], ruguo [If only]), generating a spectrum of counterfactuality that varies in the degree of such deviation.…”