| Abstract |
Psycholinguistic studies have repeatedly demonstrated that downward entailing quantifiers are more difficult to process than upward entailing ones. Although the empirical phenomenon itself is well-documented, it is a matter of current debate what cognitive processes cause the monotonicity effect. Our main aim is to contribute to this debate by testing predictions about the underlying processes that are derived from competing theoretical proposals: two-step and pragmatic processing models. To this end, we model data from two verification experiments, in particular, reaction times and accuracy, using a well-established model of decision making from mathematical psychology, namely the diffusion decision model (DDM). In both experiments, verification of upward entailing ‘more than half’ was compared to downward entailing ‘fewer than half’. One experiment employed a sentence-picture verification task and the other one used a purely linguistic version of the task. Our initial analyses revealed the same pattern of results across tasks: Both non-decision times and drift rates, two of the free model parameters of the DDM, were affected by the monotonicity manipulation. Thus, our initial modeling results support both two-step (prediction: non-decision time is affected) and pragmatic processing models (prediction: drift rate is affected). I will discuss theoretical implications of these results. |